Talk:Secularism in India/Archives/01

Removed quotes

I removed these quotes as I found them to be non-notable:

• In the West, secularism implies pinpricking religious fraud and arrogance, but in India, secularists are the most eloquent defenders of myth and theocracy.
  • Elst, Koenraad, Who is a Hindu, (2001)

• As a general rule, you can predict what the secularist position on any issue will be once you know what the militant Islamist position is. From justifying terrorism to misrepresenting the Ayodhya evidence, the two are rarely very different.
  • Elst, Koenraad, Ayodhya, the Finale (2003)

• The word secular is defined in the dictionaries as "the belief that the state, morals, education, etc. should be independent of religion." But in India it means only one thing -- eschewing everything Hindu and espousing everything Islamic.
  • Goel, Sita Ram: Perversion of India's Political Parlance (1984)

• It is, therefore, intriguing that the most fanatical and fundamentalist adherents of Christianity and Islam in India - Christian missionaries and Muslim mullahs - cry themselves hoarse in defence of Indian Secularism.
  • Goel, Sita Ram: Freedom of expression - Secular Theocracy Versus Liberal Democracy (1998)

• Even Muslim activists whose counterparts in Turkey or Egypt denounce secularism as a demonic betrayal of Islam, call themselves “secularists”.
  • Elst Koenraad, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind (2001)

• A number of Indians have tried to define secularism as sarva dharma samabhava (equal respect for all religions). I cannot say whether they have been naive or clever in doing so. But the fact remains that secularism cannot admit of such an interpretation. In fact, orthodox Muslims are quite justified in regarding it as irreligious. Moreover, dharma cannot be defined as religion which is a Semitic concept and applies only to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Hinduism is not a religion in that sense; nor are Jainism and Buddhism, or for that matter, Taoism and Confucianism.
  • Girilal Jain, "Limits of the Hindu Rashtra", in : Elst, Koenraad: Ayodhya and after, Appendix I

• As far as I know, Nehru never defined secularism in its proper European and historical context.
  • Girilal Jain, "This is Hindu India", in : Elst, Koenraad: Ayodhya and after, Appendix I

• Elst suggests Lokayata (in the sense of worldliness) as a better Hindi word for modern secularism.
  • M.R. Paranjape, Altered Destinations Self, Society, and Nation in India, by Makarand R. Paranjape

• Secularism per se is a doctrine which arose in the modem West as a revolt against the dosed creed of Christianity. Its battle-cry was that the State should be freed from the stranglehold of the Church, and the citizen should be left to his own individual choice in matters of belief. And it met with great success in every Western democracy. Had India borrowed this doctrine from the modem West, it would have meant a rejection of the dosed creeds of Islam and Christianity, and a promotion of the Sanatana Dharma family of faiths which have been naturally secularist in the modern Western sense. But what happened actually was that Secularism in India became the greatest protector of closed creeds which had come here in the company of foreign invaders, and kept tormenting the national society for several centuries.
  We should not, therefore, confuse India's Secularism with its namesake in the modern West. The Secularism which Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru propounded and which has prospered in post-independence India, is a new concoction and should be recognized as such. We need not bother about its various definitions as put forward by its pandits. We shall do better if we have a close look at its concrete achievements.
  Going by those achievements, one can conclude quite safely that Nehruvian Secularism is a magic formula for transmitting base metals into twenty-four carat gold. How else do we explain the fact of Islam becoming a religion, and that too a religion of tolerance, social equality, and human brotherhood; or the fact of Muslim rule in medieval India becoming an indigenous dispensation; or the fact of Muhammad bin Qasim becoming a liberator of the toiling masses in Sindh; or the fact of Mahmud Ghaznavi becoming the defreezer of productive wealth hoarded in Hindu temples; or the fact of Muhammad Ghuri becoming the harbinger of an urban revolution; or the fact of Muinuddin Chishti becoming the great Indian saint; or the fact of Amir Khusru becoming the pioneer of communal amity; or the fact of Alauddin Khilji becoming the first socialist in the annals of this country; or the fact of Akbar becoming the father of Indian nationalism; or the fact of Aurangzeb becoming the benefactor of Hindu temples; or the fact of Sirajuddaula, Mir Qasim, Hyder Ali, Tipu Sultan, and Bahadur Shah Zafar becoming the heroes of India's freedom struggle against British imperialism or the fact of the Faraizis, the Wahabis, and the Moplahs becoming peasant revolutionaries and foremost freedom fighters?
  One has only to go to the original sources in order to understand the true character of Islam and its above-mentioned luminaries. And one can see immediately that their true character has nothing to do with that with which they have been invested in our school and college text-books. No deeper probe is needed for unraveling the mysteries of Nehruvian Secularism.
  • Sita Ram Goel, Tipu Sultan - Villain or Hero (1993)

• Thus Hindu society not only presents itself as a prey to these exclusive, intolerant and imperialist ideologies but also acts as a buffer between them. India is secular because India is Hindu. It can be added as a corollary that India is a democracy also because India is Hindu. If Hindu society permits this free for all any further, the days of Secularism and Democracy in this country are numbered. Let the Hindus unite and save themselves, their democratic polity, their secular state, and their Sanatana Dharma for a new cycle of civilization, not only for themselves but also the world.
  • Sita Ram Goel, Hindu Society under Siege (1992)

• Though borrowed from the West, secularism in India served a different end. In the West, it was directed against the clergy, tyrannical rulers, and had therefore a liberating role; in India, it was designed and actually used by Macaulayites to keep down the Hindus, the victims of two successive imperialisms expending over a thousand years. In the West, it opposed the Church which claimed to be the sole custodian of truth, which took upon itself the responsibility of dictating science and ordering thought, which decided when the world was created, whether the earth is flat or round, whether the sun or the earth moves round the other, which gave definitive conclusions on all matters and punished and dissent. But in India, secularism was directed against Hinduism which made no such claims, which laid down no dogmas and punished no dissent, which fully accepted the role of reason and unhampered inquiry in all matters, spiritual and secular; which encouraged viewing things from multiple angles....
  There is yet another difference. In the West, the struggle for secularism called for sacrifice and suffering-remember the imprisonments, the stakes, the Index; remember the condemnation of Galileo; remember how Bruno, Lucilio Vanini, Francis Kett, Bartholomew Legate, Wightman and others were burnt at the stake. But in India secularism has been a part of the Establishment, first of the British and then of our own self-alienated rulers. It has been used against Hinduism which has nourished a great spirit and culture of tolerance, free inquiry and intellectual....Secularism has become a name for showing one's distance from this great religion and culture. Macaulayites and Marxists also use it for Hindu- baiting.
  • Ram Swarup, "Seeing through Indian secularism", in: Koenraad Elst, Ayodhya and After: Issues Before Hindu Society (1991), Appendix II

• In India, political incidents frequently pit Hindu nationalism, or even just plain Hinduism and plain nationalism, against so-called “secularism”. In practice, this term denotes a combine of Islamists, Hindu-born Marxists, Christian missionaries and americanized adepts of consumerism who share a hatred of Hindu culture and Hindu self-respect. What passes for secularism in India is often the diametrical opposite of what goes by the same name in the West. Genuine secular states have equality before the law of all citizens regardless of religion. By contrast, India has different civil codes depending on the citizen's religion. Thus, for Christians it is very hard to get a divorce, Hindus and Muslim women can get one through judicial proceedings, and Muslim men can simply repudiate their wives. The secular alternative, a common civil code, is championed by the Hindu nationalists. It is the so-called secularists who, justifying themselves with specious sophistry, join hands with the most obscurantist religious leaders to insist on maintaining the present unequal system.
  Likewise, there exists a legal inequality in matters of temple management, pilgrimage subsidies, special autonomy for states depending on their populations' religious composition, and the right to found religious schools; and this inequality is defended by the so-called secularists because it is invariably to the disadvantage of the Hindus. The Hindu nationalists favour the secular alternative of equality regardless of religion.
  In India, shari'a -wielding Muslim clerics whose Arab counterparts denounce secularism as the ultimate evil, call themselves secularists. Just as the English word deception differs in meaning from its French counterpart déception (= disappointment), the word secularism has a sharply different meaning in Indian English as compared to metropolitan English.
  When we consider “secularism” as an intellectual movement rather than as a juridical concept, “secularism” means that religion is treated as a human construct rather than the product of a divine revelation. It implies a frank and critical investigation of the claims of religion. In this respect, the failure and dishonesty of Indian secularism is even more radical. Its discourse on religion is extremely and wilfully superficial. It shields from criticism even the most obscurantist religious beliefs or institutions, provided they are non-Hindu (and even in attacking Hinduism, its criticisms of even legitimate targets tend to be crassly superficial). For instance, almost every self-styled secularist, from former President A.K. Narayanan to the editors of the newspapers, has sworn by the story that Christianity was brought to India by the apostle Thomas. In the West, not just secularists but even Catholic universities like the one where I studied have dropped this myth. But in India, the secularists are its most determined upholders.
  • Elst, Koenraad, The Problem with Secularism (2007)

• A visit to India was the next logical step. When I arrived, the Indian papers were full of the controversy over the ban on Salman Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses. To my surprise, many so-called "secularists", such as Khushwant Singh and M.J. Akbar, supported the ban, which had been promulgated by the "secularist" Congress government. The more I learned about this Indian "secularism", the more it became clear to me that it was often the very opposite of what we in the West in genuinely secular states call "secularism".
  Indeed, over the years I have had many a good laugh at the pompous moralism and blatant dishonesty of India's so-called secularists. Their specialty is to justify double standards, e.g. why mentioning murdered Kashmiri Pandits is “communal hate-mongering” while the endless litany about murdered Gujarati Muslims is “secular consciousness-raising”. Sometimes they merely stonewall inconvenient information, such as when they tried to deny and suppress the historical data about the forcible replacement of a Rama temple in Ayodhya by a mosque: given the strength of the evidence, all they could do was to drown out any serious debate with screams and swearwords. But often they do bring out their specific talents at sophistry, such as when they argue that a Common Civil Code, a defining element of all secular states, is a Hindu communalist notion, while the preservation of the divinely-revealed Shari’a for the Muslims is secular. That’s when they are at their best....
  In Europe, the Pope is the scapegoat par excellence of militant secularists and atheists, but in India he is counted among the "secular" alliance (along with the most obscurantist Mullahs, self-described “secularists” whose like-minded Arab colleagues abhor secularism), for he is anti-Hindu and that's the only qualification you need to earn the label "secularist". To the RSS, the secularists are accomplices of the anti-national forces, of Pakistan and the terrorists. That is not incorrect, but to me, they are first of all a bunch of clowns.
  • Elst Koenraad, Hinduism, Environmentalism and the Nazi Bogey -- A preliminary reply to Ms. Meera Nanda, In: Return of the Swastika: Hate and Hysteria versus Hindu Sanity (2007), chapter 3.

• Its roots [of the term 'communalism'] lie in the British colonial policy of taking “communities” as the relevant units in recruitment or in the allotment of seats in representative assemblies. Originally, the term had no pejorative connotation, but Indian nationalists in the freedom movement objected to these “communal” policies which allegedly aimed at keeping the Indian population divided. Indeed, the biggest worry of the freedom movement was the “communalist” collaboration of the Muslim League with the colonial administration: in exchange for “communal” electorates and recruitment quota, the party claiming to represent the Indian Muslims agreed to stay aloof from the anti-British agitation. Today, “communalism” is one of those labels allotted exclusively to people who reject it; it is a term of abuse. Even people who advocate communal recruitment quota (a demand recently revived by an array of Muslim organizations) are now self-described “secularists” and signatories to every new “National Manifesto [...] Against Communalism.... Jamaat-i-Islami (whose Pakistani wing has campaigned for decades, and with success, for the desecularization of the state) attacks “communalism” in the name of “secularism”. I cannot recall a single issue of the Islamist papers Radiance and Muslim India which failed to brandish “secularism” and denounce “communalism”.
  • Elst Koenraad, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind (2001)

MonsterHunter32 (talk) 18:10, 25 April 2018 (UTC)

Sourcing

The following quotes need to be properly sourced to be verified:

• The word secular is defined in the dictionaries as "the belief that the state, morals, education, etc. should be independent of religion." But in India it means only one thing -- eschewing everything Hindu and espousing everything Islamic.
  • Goel, Sita Ram: Perversion of India's Political Parlance (1984)

• But there is an even more potent cause for the near total erasure of such material from our public discourse and our instruction. And that is the form of “secularism” which we have practised these forty-five years: a “secularism” in which double-standards have been the norm, one in which everything that may remove the dross by which our national identity has been covered has become anathema.
  • Arun Shourie - Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

Rupert Loup 13:37, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

Deleted quotes

Rupert loup has deleted many well sourced quotes from the article,

The quotes are all properly sourced. Could Rupert loup tell us on the talkpage why he deleted them?

All pov's should be represented, and not censored.

No relevant wikipedia policy has been cited as reason for deletion. Wikiquote policies apply on wikiquote and not wikipedia policies. He has been here long enough on WQ to know this. "Reliable" in the context of wikiquote means that the quote is reliably sourced, i.e. it is exactly like in the published source (ideally the primary source, if not, the secondary source).

• I believe that the word secular is the biggest lie since Independence. Those that have given birth to this lie and those that use it should apologise to the people and this country. No system can be secular. Political system can be sect-neutral. If someone were to say that government has to be run by one way of prayer, that is not possible. In UP, I have to look at 22 crore people and I am answerable for their security and their feelings. But I am not sitting here to ruin one community either. You can be sect-neutral but not secular.
  • Yogi Adityanath, quoted in The Indian Express, Secular word is the biggest lie, says Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath, 14 November 2017. [1]

• Secular, as I understand, means that religion should not play any role in governance. If it’s true, then why were you quiet for last 10 years when the ruling party was continuously giving alms to Muslims? Did you and your fellow signatories utter a word when PM M.M. Singh said that minorities have first right over natural resources? ... Secularism was nothing but a ploy to attract Muslim votes and keep a control on Hindus from asserting themselves. ... If your fellow ‘secular’ filmwallas feel so strongly about the ‘secular foundations’ and its preservation thereof, how come they never uttered a word against the Muzzafarnagar riots? Or against Shri Mulayam Singh Yadav? Or Azam Khan? Or Abu Azmi?
  • Vivek Agnihotri - Urban Naxals The Making of Buddha in a Traffic Jam (2018, Garuda Prakashan)

• “The secular state assumes that the Semitic religions and the Hindu traditions are instances of the same kind”
• “When Indian intellectuals use existing theories about religion and its history – for example, to analyse ‘Hindu-Muslim’ strife – they reproduce, both directly and indirectly, what the West has been saying so far. (…) the ‘secularist’ discourse about this issue can hardly be distinguished – both in terms of the contents or the vocabulary – from Orientalist writings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”
  • S. N. Balagangadhara (p.47) [Secularism is the direct heir of the colonial dispensation.] quoted from Koenraad Elst, On Modi Time : Merits And Flaws of Hindu Activism In Its Day Of Incumbency – 2015. Ch. 3. The Lost Honour of India Studies

• No matter how much tyranny, how much injustice is heaped on Hindus anywhere in the world, the State of India is not bothered - this is the essence of Secularism in India.
  • A. Chatterjee: Hindu nation, quoted from Elst, Koenraad (2001). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa. p. 518-519

• While secularism is a European import into India, I just don't recognize the secularism practiced in India.
• In my country, we think that secularism implies the freedom to learn, teach and practice a religion, and also the freedom to reject, abandon and criticize a religion. But in India, those who call themselves secular, combine a Stalinist propensity to ban religious education in (non-minority) schools, or to ban religious TV serials, with a bigoted propensity to ban books that take a critical look at religions. In both cases, they arrogate the right to decide for others what they can see and read, and what not. We think that secularism means : let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred ideas compete. But in India, the favourite slogan of secularists is : Ban it ! Listen here, friends : banning for secularism is like f...ing for virginity.
• Their justification is that these books and films might hurt feelings and thus disturb communal harmony. Indian secularists declare that a critical or blasphemous book should be banned, because it may offend someone's feelings. Genuine secularists oppose bans because a ban offends our intelligence. And offended it is, by these inflated book-banners who claim the right to decide for us what we can read and what not.
• Of course, the Hindutva people are right when they call the secularists pseudo-secularists.
• If secularism means what it really means, as in Europe, then the people who make common cause with Muslim fundamentalists and defend a separate status for a state with a Muslim majority, religion-based personal laws, and religion-based discrimination in education or in temple management, cannot count as secularists. They are pseudo-secularists, and their opponents are genuine secularists.
• Secularism should be defended in its genuine European sense, against the Stalinist perversion of secularism that still has quite a following in India.
• You see, the secularists are like the followers of Big Brother in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. When Big Brother has raised the prices, they hold a demonstration to thank him for lowering the prices. And when a Muslim government organizes pogroms against the Hindus, the secularists thank it for keeping communal harmony.
• In Hindu culture, even in its most unsophisticated popular forms, this focus on individual consciousness is always there. No group prayers, one's religious experience is one's personal affair. Therefore, this concept of leaving religion to the care of the individual, with no authority above him empowered to dictate beliefs or religious practices, which in the West constituted a cultural revolution called secularism, is nothing new to Hindu culture. This is not an idealization but a firm reality : no matter what the "evils of Hindu society" may have been, subjecting the individual's freedom of religion to any public authority is not one of them. No wonder that Voltaire, who strongly opposed the Church's totalitarian grip over men's lives, and may count as one of the ideologues of secularism, mentioned the religions of India and China as a model of how religion could be a free exploration by the individual.
• The official Hindi term for secularism is dharmanirpekshata, i.e. dharma-neutrality. Critics of Nehruvian secularism say the correct translation would be panthanirpekshata or sampradayanirpekshata, i.e. sect- neutrality.
• So, the concepts of "dharma" and "religion" overlap only partly. The term dharmanirpekshata becomes a bit absurd or even sinister when it turns out to say "duty- neutrality" or "righteousness-neutrality" (though it applies accurately to the utter corruption in which Nehru's secular socialism has plunged the Indian state). The absurdity really comes out when we translate it as "value-system-neutrality". You just cannot have a polity without a value-system that sustains the unity and integrity of the whole. Even secularism implies something of a value-system.
  • Elst, Koenraad (1991). Ayodhya and after: Issues before Hindu society.

• Even Muslim activists whose counterparts in Turkey or Egypt denounce secularism as a demonic betrayal of Islam, call themselves “secularists”.
• The general enthusiasm for "secularism" in itself should indicate that the meaning of the term has undergone a drastic change in India, and that it is irresponsible to use the term as if it had its established Western meaning.
• A professional interpreter who translates déception as deception is incompetent, and an India-watcher who translates the Indian-English term secularism into standard English as secularism, has a similar problem.
  • Elst Koenraad, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind (2001), 31-32

• One of the great surprises which Indian "secularism" offers to people familiar with genuine secularism, is that it totally shuns and even condemns the fundamental questioning of Christian (or Islamic) dogma. For ten years I have closely followed the Indian communalism debate, and not once have I seen a "secularist" mentioning the debunking of Christian beliefs, still the single most revolutionary achievement of the secular study of religions. Even non-essential Christian fairy-tales like the story of apostle Thomas's arrival and martyrdom in South India are repeated ad nauseam in "secularist" pieces on the current missionary crisis.
  • The Problem of Christian Missionaries by K. Elst, 7 June 1999. [2]

• In the West, secularism implies pinpricking religious fraud and arrogance, but in India, secularists are the most eloquent defenders of myth and theocracy.
  • Elst, Koenraad, Who is a Hindu, (2001)

• As a general rule, you can predict what the secularist position on any issue will be once you know what the militant Islamist position is. From justifying terrorism to misrepresenting the Ayodhya evidence, the two are rarely very different.
• In India, political incidents frequently pit Hindu nationalism, or even just plain Hinduism and plain nationalism, against so-called “secularism”. In practice, this term denotes a combine of Islamists, Hindu-born Marxists and consumericanized one-dimensionalists who share a hatred of Hindu culture and Hindu self-respect. What passes for secularism in India is often the diametrical opposite of what goes by the same name in the West.
• In India, sharia-wielding Muslim clerics whose Arab counterparts denounce secularism as the ultimate evil, call themselves secularists. Just as the word deception differs in meaning from its French counterpart déception (= disappointment), the word secularism has a sharply different meaning in Indian English as compared to metropolitan English.
  • Elst, Koenraad (2003). Ayodhya: The finale ; science versus secularism in the excavations debate.

• When we consider “secularism” as an intellectual movement rather than as a juridical concept, “secularism” means that religion is treated as a human construct rather than the product of a divine revelation. It implies a frank and critical investigation of the claims of religion. In this respect, the failure and dishonesty of Indian secularism is even more radical. Its discourse on religion is extremely and wilfully superficial. It shields from criticism even the most obscurantist religious beliefs or institutions, provided they are non-Hindu (and even in attacking Hinduism, its criticisms of even legitimate targets tend to be crassly superficial).
• Likewise, no discussion is opened against the denunciation of the "secular intellectuals" as "alienated pseudo-secularists full of contempt for the true Hindu culture", though the concept "pseudo-secular" is central to the whole controversy, and proves to be entirely valid when you consider that those "secularists" defend all kinds of religious discrimination, e.g. religion-based civil codes, against the genuinely and quintessentially secular system of equality of all citizens before the law regardless of their religion.
• For half a century, all official statements of the BJP and its predecessor Jana Sangh have emphasized that the party does not want to "transform India from the secular democracy its founders envisioned 55 years ago into a Hindu religious state", but that, on the contrary, it wants genuine secularism. Rather than being a hollow slogan, this position is articulated in the form of precise proposals for reform of an impeccably and undeniably secularist nature. Thus, the proposed abolition of the special status of Kashmir (Art. 370 of the Constitution) is nothing but the abolition of a religion-based privilege: no Hindu-majority state enjoys the special privileges accorded to Muslim-majority Kashmir. Likewise, any genuine secularist would abolish the existing anti-Hindu legal discriminations in matters of temple and school management and the subsidizing or taxing of pilgrimages.
• When we want to understand a social problem, we need a language capable of expressing the data and underlying concepts describing the problem. In India, political incidents frequently pit Hindu nationalism, or even just plain Hinduism and plain nationalism, against so-called "secularism". In practice, this term denotes a combine of Islamists, Hindu-born Marxists, Christian missionaries and americanized adepts of consumerism who share a hatred of Hindu culture and Hindu self-respect. What passes for secularism in India is often the diametrical opposite of what goes by the same name in the West.
• Indian secularism is systematically dishonest in its assessment of the religions hostile to Hinduism.
• In India, however, "secularism" has acquired a wholly different meaning. Ever since the term was propagated by Jawaharlal Nehru, being an Indian secularist does not require you to reject theocracy and the intrusion of Religion into politics. On the contrary, every obscurantist in India swears by "secularism". The word's effective Meaning has shifted to a concern quite unknown to its European coiners, viz, the struggle against Hinduism.
• It is a different matter that the hollow and crassly superficial Ideology of Nehruvian secularism is secure in its power position because of the absence of credible challengers. With a political opposition claiming to be "positive secularists" and "genuine secularists", India's official "pseudo-secularism" has no one to fear.
  • Elst, Koenraad, The Problem with Secularism (2007)

• When I arrived [in India], the Indian papers were full of the controversy over the ban on Salman Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses. To my surprise, many so-called "secularists", such as Khushwant Singh and M.J. Akbar, supported the ban, which had been promulgated by the "secularist" Congress government. The more I learned about this Indian "secularism", the more it became clear to me that it was often the very opposite of what we in the West in genuinely secular states call "secularism".
• Indeed, over the years I have had many a good laugh at the pompous moralism and blatant dishonesty of India's so-called secularists. Their specialty is to justify double standards, e.g. why mentioning murdered Kashmiri Pandits is “communal hate-mongering” while the endless litany about murdered Gujarati Muslims is “secular consciousness-raising”. Sometimes they merely stonewall inconvenient information, such as when they tried to deny and suppress the historical data about the forcible replacement of a Rama temple in Ayodhya by a mosque: given the strength of the evidence, all they could do was to drown out any serious debate with screams and swearwords. But often they do bring out their specific talents at sophistry, such as when they argue that a Common Civil Code, a defining element of all secular states, is a Hindu communalist notion, while the preservation of the divinely-revealed Shari’a for the Muslims is secular. That’s when they are at their best.
• In the run-up to the Pope's visit to Delhi in 1999, the secularists fell over each other trying to be the loudest and shrillest in denying the "vicious Hindutva propaganda" that the Catholic Church has as its stated goal to convert the whole of India (and the world) to its own belief system.
• In Europe, the Pope is the scapegoat par excellence of militant secularists and atheists, but in India he is counted among the "secular" alliance (along with the most obscurantist Mullahs, self-described “secularists” whose like-minded Arab colleagues abhor secularism), for he is anti-Hindu and that's the only qualification you need to earn the label "secularist". To the RSS, the secularists are accomplices of the anti-national forces, of Pakistan and the terrorists. That is not incorrect, but to me, they are first of all a bunch of clowns.
  • Elst Koenraad, Hinduism, Environmentalism and the Nazi Bogey -- A preliminary reply to Ms. Meera Nanda, In: Return of the Swastika: Hate and Hysteria versus Hindu Sanity (2007), chapter 3.

• On the Hindu side then, at least the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, "National Volunteer Corps") could qualify as "communalist"? Certainly, it is called just that by all its numerous enemies. But then, when you look through any issue of its weekly Organiser, you will find it brandishing the notion of "positive" or "genuine secularism", and denouncing "pseudo-secularism", i.e. minority communalism.
  • Elst, K. in : India's only communalist. A short biography of Sita Ram Goel [3]

• Anyway, his remark that my writing is “controversial” is a statement of a social fact, but is not an evaluation of my work. There is, for instance, nothing controversial about my perfectly logical and factual observation, repeated on many forums, that Indian “secularism” fails the very first test of secularism, viz. by adhering to separate law systems depending on religion. Of course I know that the Indian establishment and its parrots in Western academe swear by this hypocritical situation: treating citizens differently according to their religion yet calling it “secularism”. But what I say is just logic and would be approved by any candid and unforewarned outsider, while the prevalent claim of Indian “secularism” amounts to a defence of vested political interests.
• Most Western experts start their papers with the assertion: ”India’s secularism is threatened by Hindu nationalism.” That position is not socially controversial, it is the received wisdom, but it is logically controversial and implies the untrue description of the present system as “secular”. It is also logically controversial, in fact untenable, to describe as a “threat to secularism” the BJP, the only party whose manifesto promises the enactment of a Common Civil Code, that definitional cornerstone of secularism, taken for granted in most Western countries.
• Secondly, another criterion to decide whether a movement is “far” or “extreme” is its attitude to democracy. Many secularists who dole out the label “extreme right” so easily, have completely forgotten about democracy. Of course they do, because India was declared a “secular, socialist republic” under Indira Gandhi’s Emergency dictatorship, which many vocal secularists supported. The first thing that Hitler (following Lenin) did upon coming to power, was to abolish democracy. Now, let us look at Voice of India in this regard. Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel, Gandhian freedom-fighters in their youth (whereas the much-revered Dr. Bhimrao Ambekar emphatically pronounced himself in favour of the continuation of colonial rule), stood by democracy all their lives. They actively opposed the Emergency dictatorship, in this case alongside the Hindutva organizations (and a faction among the Communists), against its secularist enforcers.
• Quite the contrary. Secularists when corred often resort to the argument that the word “secularism” happens to have different meanings in Europe and India. I however maintain that “secularism” has only one real meaning, that this meaning was already firmly established before the word came to be used in India, and that what prevails in India is therefore something else than secularism.
  • Elst, Koenraad. The Wikipedia lemma on "Koenraad Elst": a textbook example of defamation (2013) [4]

• Indeed, Muslims outside India openly abhor secularism; those in India only swear by “secularism” because they know that there, the word is used improperly and effectively only means “anti-Hindu”. Not that she drew attention to the fact that “secularism” has a very different meaning to Westerners from what it has come to mean in India. Indian secularists prefer to keep the rest of the world in ignorance about their own dirty little secret, viz. that “secularism” in India often means the very opposite of its normal meaning. When you question an Indian secularist at close quarters, he will try to save his position by explaining that secularism in India happens to mean something different from what it means in the West? But do they tell this to Western audiences? Prof. Kapur at any rate did not. Westerners’ automatic sympathy for Indian secularism (and against the supposed “theocrats” they hear about) is predicated on the assumption that their own familiar secularism is also present in India, that both are the same. Logic teaches that “a = a”, that a term has the same meaning throughout a reasoning process, so Westerners assume that “secularism” means secularism, and this Indian law professor certainly wasn’t going to pin-prick that illusion. So instead, she explained that the Hindu Right only wanted “formal equality” (understood as “justice to all, appeasement of none”) while the rest wanted “substantive equality”, a position she found far more sophisticated and just. But any law scholar would understand that the law is precisely about “formal” equality. In the real world, one man is rich and another poor, one is talented and another dumb, etc.; but at least in law, they are equal. The law cannot neutralize the inequalities given to men by nature; but the least it can do, is to make men at least “formally” equal. And that is the case in a Common Civil Code, which the BJP advocates and which she therefore considered a “threat to India’s secularism”. [...]
• It is characteristic of practically all texts lauding India’s “secularism” that this inconvenient truth is omitted, and secularism is attributed to the unquestionable authority of the Constitution and its supposed author, BR Ambedkar. ... “secular” was a product of the Emergency... The word “secular” was not part of India’s political parlance in the days of the Constituent Assembly, and even the Republic (let alone India itself) was not founded as a “secular” state. On the contrary, the Constituent Assembly through its chairman, BR Ambedkar, explicitly rejected the two S words. India became a “secular socialist” republic under the Emergency dictatorship (1975-77) without proper Parliamentary debate. “Secular” is one of the few words in the Constitution that was enacted without democratic basis, and this is only fitting for a “secularism” which has always and unabashedly been despotic and anti-majority. There may be many things wrong with democracy, but it is not anti-majority. Indeed, that is precisely what is wrong with democracy, according to the secularists.
• Being naturally despotic, the Nehruvian secularists used precisely this intermezzo [the Emergency dictatorship (1975-77)] to insert “secular, socialist” into the text of the Constitution. The declaration of India as a “secular” republic, without a proper parliamentary debate, is thus the only part of the Constitution that is historically undemocratic. (Ch 30)
• The iron fist of the attack (the Zarb-e-Mo’min, “strike of the faithful”, as the Pakistani Army once named one of its exercises) is furnished by Christianity and Islam, who mean to expand worldwide and in the process destroy all heathen religions. They have a positive goal, viz. perpetuating and propagating themselves, and their negative goal of digesting or annihilating Hinduism only follows therefrom. This way, they have a very good conscience in doing their work of destruction: it is only meant to clear the way for the true religion. So, they have inner strength, but they also have outer strength: they are huge and very wealthy, being only the Indian arms of two worldwide movements. It is ridiculous that they are called “minorities” at all, yet they carefully cultivate that status, for in the present-day mentality, any majority is deemed overbearing and oppressive. Their foreign roots not only make them very resourceful, they also give them a head-start in developing a coherent strategy with sustainable long-term goals. But this iron fist is clothed in a velvet glove: secularism. Knaves claim and fools believe that this is the Indian instance of the worldwide phenomenon of secularism (separation of religion and politics) originating in the West, but it is not. Thus, Islamic militants who in Arabia would abhor secularism (meaning separation of religion and politics, e.g. democratic law-making separate from what Islam prescribes), emphatically call themselves “secularists” in India. The reason is that in India, the word has a very different meaning: anything that is anti-Hindu. Islamic militants are anti-Hindu, so they indeed qualify as “secularists”. But what animates them is not this profile of secularism but their heartfelt commitment to Islam; and similarly with Christian missionaries, who can rightly call themselves secularists under the Indian definition, though their real commitment is to Christianity. So when we say “secularists”, we don’t usually mean them, we mean the Hindu-born secularists, who genuinely intend to define their uppermost commitment when they call themselves secularists. (Ch 32)
  • Koenraad Elst, On Modi Time : Merits And Flaws of Hindu Activism In Its Day Of Incumbency – 2015

• The word secular is defined in the dictionaries as "the belief that the state, morals, education, etc. should be independent of religion." But in India it means only one thing -- eschewing everything Hindu and espousing everything Islamic.
  • Goel, Sita Ram: Perversion of India's Political Parlance (1984)

• In the current political parlance Islamic imperialism masquerades as secularism, while Indian nationalism gets branded as "Hindu communalism".
  • S.R. Goel in Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume I (1990), p. 217, 2nd edition (also in History Versus Casuistry:Preface, 1991)

• The concept of Secularism as known to the modern West is dreaded, derided and denounced in the strongest terms by the foundational doctrines of Christianity and Islam. Both of these doctrines prescribe Theocracy under which the State serves as the secular arm of the Church or the Ummah, and society is regimented by the Sacred Canon or the Shariat. This fact is more than evident if we survey the history of Christianity till the French Revolution, and the practice which prevails in all Islamic states till today. It is a different matter that Christianity has reconciled itself to Secularism because of its steep decline in its traditional homelands - Europe and the Americas. The doctrine remains unchanged and Christianity will restore Theocracy if it were to acquire power again. Islam has yet to evince any sign of similar reconciliation with Secularism either in doctrine or in practice. In fact, the recent trend in most Islamic countries has been to revert to Theocracy in its pristine form, that is, as it existed under the four "rightly guided caliphs".
  It is, therefore, intriguing that the most fanatical and fundamentalist adherents of Christianity and Islam in India - Christian missionaries and Muslim mullahs - cry themselves hoarse in defence of Indian Secularism... The puzzle needs unravelling unless one is satisfied with the mere sound of the word 'secularism', and at the same time nails pluralistic Hinduism as a closed monotheism like Islam and Christianity as India-watchers in the West and their lickspittles in this country have been doing for a long time... It can be concluded quite safely that although all 'secularists' may not be scoundrels, all scoundrels in India are 'secularists'. (...) Secularism in the West had risen as a revolt against the closed creed of Christianity and had meant, for more than 150 years, a freeing of the State from the clutches of the Church. In the Indian context it should have meant a revolt against the closed creed of Islam as well, and keeping the state aloof from the influence of mullahs.
  • Goel, Sita Ram: Freedom of expression - Secular Theocracy Versus Liberal Democracy (1998)

• Secularism per se is a doctrine which arose in the modem West as a revolt against the dosed creed of Christianity. Its battle-cry was that the State should be freed from the stranglehold of the Church, and the citizen should be left to his own individual choice in matters of belief. And it met with great success in every Western democracy. Had India borrowed this doctrine from the modem West, it would have meant a rejection of the dosed creeds of Islam and Christianity, and a promotion of the Sanatana Dharma family of faiths which have been naturally secularist in the modern Western sense. But what happened actually was that Secularism in India became the greatest protector of closed creeds which had come here in the company of foreign invaders, and kept tormenting the national society for several centuries.
  We should not, therefore, confuse India's Secularism with its namesake in the modern West. The Secularism which Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru propounded and which has prospered in post-independence India, is a new concoction and should be recognized as such. We need not bother about its various definitions as put forward by its pandits. We shall do better if we have a close look at its concrete achievements.
  Going by those achievements, one can conclude quite safely that Nehruvian Secularism is a magic formula for transmitting base metals into twenty-four carat gold. How else do we explain the fact of Islam becoming a religion, and that too a religion of tolerance, social equality, and human brotherhood; or the fact of Muslim rule in medieval India becoming an indigenous dispensation; or the fact of Muhammad bin Qasim becoming a liberator of the toiling masses in Sindh; or the fact of Mahmud Ghaznavi becoming the defreezer of productive wealth hoarded in Hindu temples; or the fact of Muhammad Ghuri becoming the harbinger of an urban revolution; or the fact of Muinuddin Chishti becoming the great Indian saint; or the fact of Amir Khusru becoming the pioneer of communal amity; or the fact of Alauddin Khilji becoming the first socialist in the annals of this country; or the fact of Akbar becoming the father of Indian nationalism; or the fact of Aurangzeb becoming the benefactor of Hindu temples; or the fact of Sirajuddaula, Mir Qasim, Hyder Ali, Tipu Sultan, and Bahadur Shah Zafar becoming the heroes of India's freedom struggle against British imperialism or the fact of the Faraizis, the Wahabis, and the Moplahs becoming peasant revolutionaries and foremost freedom fighters?
  One has only to go to the original sources in order to understand the true character of Islam and its above-mentioned luminaries. And one can see immediately that their true character has nothing to do with that with which they have been invested in our school and college text-books. No deeper probe is needed for unraveling the mysteries of Nehruvian Secularism.
  • Sita Ram Goel, Tipu Sultan - Villain or Hero (1993)

• Thus Hindu society not only presents itself as a prey to these exclusive, intolerant and imperialist ideologies but also acts as a buffer between them. India is secular because India is Hindu. It can be added as a corollary that India is a democracy also because India is Hindu. If Hindu society permits this free for all any further, the days of Secularism and Democracy in this country are numbered. Let the Hindus unite and save themselves, their democratic polity, their secular state, and their Sanatana Dharma for a new cycle of civilization, not only for themselves but also the world.
  
  Another side of the same strategy has been worked out to neutralise, paralyse and blacken or pamper different sections of Hindu society so that the road is cleared for the forward march of Islamism. Some salient features of this secondary strategy can be outlined as follows: 1. The concept of Secularism which is enshrined in the Constitution of India and which has become the most sacred slogan for all our political parties should be distorted, misinterpreted and misused to the maximum to block out the least little expression of Hindu culture in the state apparatus and public life of India;...
  
  That brings us to the second subject where the United Front between Islamism and Communism scored a notable victory-the subject of Secularism. They joined hands to jibe at Secularism till the concept was totally distorted and became a synonym for Islamic imperialism. Secularism as a state policy had been evolved in the modern West which had become sick of the contending theocratic claims of Christian churches. Theocracy had been as alien to Hindu state and society as it had been intrinsic to Christian and Islamic state and society. Secularism was, therefore, nothing new for the Hindus. ....
  • Sita Ram Goel, Hindu Society under Siege (1992)

• The puzzle gets solved when one contemplates the character of Indian Secularism and finds that is no more than a smokescreen used by the Muslim-Christian-Communist combine in order to keep India's national society and culture at bay. ... They are simply projecting their self-images on to those whom they view as their enemies. ....
  • S.R. Goel. Hindu and Hinduism, Manipulation of meanings, 1993.

• I have no use for a Secularism which treats Hinduism as just another religion, and puts it on par with Islam and Christianity. For me, this concept of Secularism is a gross perversion of the concept which arose in the modem West as a revolt against Christianity and which should mean, in the Indian context, a revolt against Islam as well.
  • S.R. Goel. How I became a Hindu (1982)

• I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that Secularism in its present Indian form is no more than an embodiment of anti-Hindu animus, and is supported by all those who want to destroy Hindu society and culture. Secularism is essentially a political concept which originated and took shape in nineteenth century Europe. ....It was in this atmosphere of revolt against Christianity and its closed culture that the concept of Secularism was evolved and employed in country after country in Europe. The secular power of the State was no longer to be the secular arm of the Church. It was to become secular on its own, that is, a power which secured equal rights to all its citizens without bothering about their beliefs. The Church was separated from the State which was no longer supposed to interfere with the religious life of the citizens, or to discriminate against any citizen on the basis of his on her religion or absence of it. Religion was now to be treated as a purely private matter in which the state was not supposed to pry, and which was not to be projected in public affairs.
  • S.R.Goel. Defence of Hindu Society (1983)

• The smokescreen for this Stalinist operation was provided by the slogan of Secularism which nobody was supposed to question, or examine as to what it had come to mean. Its meaning had to be accepted ex-cathedra, and as laid down by the Muslim-Marxist combine. In the new political parlance that emerged, Hinduism and the nationalism it inspired, became blackned as “Communalism”. Small wonder that the word “Hindu” started becoming a dirty word in the academia as well as the media. ... Secularism arose in the modern West as a revolt against the closed theology of Christianity which had acquired a stranglehold on the State; in India, unfortunately, Secularism has become the biggest single protector of closed theologies promoted by Christianity and Islam. ... All this was being done by [Nehru] in the name of Secularism, which concept he had picked up from the modern West and perverted to mean the opposite of what it meant there.
  • S.R. Goel in Shourie, A., & Goel, S. R. (1993). Hindu temples: What happened to them. Vol. II

• [Nehru's] animus against Hinduism was derived from his love for Communism. He knew next to nothing about Buddhism; the only reason be hailed it as well as its hero, Ashoka, was that in his perception Buddhism was a 'revolt' against 'reactionary' Brahminism. Had he known the truth about Buddhism, he would have dropped it like a hot potato. The same psychology made him fall for Islam. Otherwise he was equally ignorant of, and equally indifferent to all religions. The Secularism which he espoused was not borrowed from the modem West. For him, it was only a smokescreen for Hindu-baiting. The fashion was picked up fast by a servile intelligentsia and became a national cult.
  • S.R. Goel in : Freedom of expression - Secular Theocracy Versus Liberal Democracy (1998)

• The fourth phase which commenced with the coming of independence proved a boon for Christianity. The Christian right to convert Hindus was incorporated in the Constitution. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru who dominated the scene for 17 long years, promoted every anti-Hindu ideology and movement behind the smokescreen of a counterfeit secularism. The regimes that followed continued to raise the spectre of ‘Hindu communalism’ as the most frightening phenomenon.
  • S.R. Goel in Vindicated by Time: The Niyogi Committee Report (1998)

• Secularism in the modern West had symbolized a humanist and rationalist revolt against the closed creed of Christianity and stood for pluralism such as has characterized Hinduism down the ages. But Pandit Nehru had perverted the word and turned it into a shield for protecting every closed creed prevailing in India at the dawn of independence in 1947 Islam, Christianity, Communism.
  • Goel, S.R. Vindicated by Time: The Niyogi Committee Report (1998)

• What helped the Christian missions a good deal from the outside was the rise of Nehruvian Secularism as India’s state policy as well as a raging fashion among India’s intellectual elite. The knowledgeable among the missionaries were surprised and somewhat amused. They knew that Secularism had risen in the West as the deadliest enemy of Christian dogmas and that it had deprived the churches of their stranglehold on state power. In India, however, Secularism was providing a smokescreen behind which Christianity could steal a march.
  • Goel, S.R. History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996)

• India has survived as a secular nation because the majority is Hindu.
  • Javed Habib, India Today, 15/12/1990. Jawed Habib, President of the Babri Masjid Action Committee, and editor of popular Urdu weekly Hujoom. Quoted from Elst, Koenraad (1991). Ayodhya and after: Issues before Hindu society.

• The 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act violates India’s international obligations to prevent deprivation of citizenship on the basis of race, color, descent, or national or ethnic origin as found in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and other human rights treaties that India has ratified. The 1992 Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities calls on governments to protect the existence and identity of religious minorities within their territories and to adopt the appropriate measures to achieve this end. Governments are obligated to ensure that people belonging to minority groups, including religious minorities, may exercise their human rights without discrimination and in full equality before the law. [...] The citizenship law and verification process are contrary to the basic principles of secularism and equality enshrined in the Indian constitution and in domestic law. Indian authorities should immediately reverse course and adopt rights-respecting laws and policies regarding citizenship. They should also uphold the rights to freedom of expression and to peaceful assembly.
  • India: Protests, Attacks Over New Citizenship Law (April 9, 2020)

• Barbosa... described the king as allowing great freedom, so that every man could... [live] according to his own beliefs without suffering any persecution, and without having to be questioned as to whether he was a Christian, Jew or Moor. A Hindu... gave funds for a mosque to be constructed. Devaraya II built a mosque in the capital for his Muslim soldiers. And Ramaraja, ... used very inclusive symbolism in the state ceremony in which Muslim soldiers offered their obeisance to him: a copy of the Quran was placed before the king so that the soldier would be honouring his faith when he bowed.
  • William J. Jackson’s book Vijayanagara Voices: Exploring South Indian History and Hindu Literature [5]

• A number of Indians have tried to define secularism as sarva dharma samabhava (equal respect for all religions). I cannot say whether they have been naive or clever in doing so. But the fact remains that secularism cannot admit of such an interpretation. In fact, orthodox Muslims are quite justified in regarding it as irreligious. Moreover, dharma cannot be defined as religion which is a Semitic concept and applies only to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Hinduism is not a religion in that sense; nor are Jainism and Buddhism, or for that matter, Taoism and Confucianism.
  
  As far as I know, Nehru never defined secularism in its proper European and historical context.
  • Girilal Jain, in : Elst, Koenraad: Ayodhya and after, Appendix I

• Decades ago, a prominent Congress leader, Kanhaiya Lal Munshi (1887-1971) had warned his party colleague, and the then Prime Minister, Jawahar Lal Nehru (1889-1964) in a letter stating, “If every time there is an inter-communal conflict, the majority is blamed regardless of the merits of the question... the springs of traditional tolerance will dry up.” Far from heeding this warning, under the guise of upholding secularism, the Congress Party has made demonisation of the majority its main political plank. This perversion is unthinkable in any other country of the world.
  • Kishwar, Madhu (2014). Modi, Muslims and media: Voices from Narendra Modi's Gujarat. p.210, with quote from K.M. Munshi, Indian Constitutional Documents: Pilgrimage to Freedom, 1902-1950,

• Congress-culture politicians and pseudo-secularists should at least inform the minority whose cause they espouse, but to whom they never dare read a lecture, that secularism and fundamentalism are mutually exclusive, and that in the Indian secular state the Muslims cannot practise their fundamentalism. Furthermore, they can also be told that history can no longer be distorted, that it cannot be made the handmaid of politics, and that therefore they need to feel sorry if not actually repentant about the past misdeeds of Muslims.
  • Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 8

• I do not know the meaning of the secularism. Yet I do not understand. Of course the dictionary meaning is absolutely different. There was a time when people were talking about the secularism, they were about the simply [sic] religious harmony. Slowly it changed the colour. Then, secularism means a lip sympathy to the minorities. Then slowly the colour changed. Then, secularism was [...] means appeasement to the minorities. Then the secularism changed the colour. Focus only on the Muslims' votebank in the name of secularism. Then the secularism changed the colour. Then, hate Hindu means secularism.
  • Narendra Modi, Speech 14 January 2008 (on YouTube). Speech commemorating the 38th anniversary of Thuglak.

• [In a veiled attack on Congress and other rivals without taking their names, the Prime Minister said that for 30 years there was a drama going on for very long.] "There was such a tag which was in fashion wearing which all sins would get washed. That fake tag was called secularism. Slogans would be raised for the unity of secular people. But you would have witnessed that from 2014 - 2019 that whole bunch stopped speaking."... "In this election not even a single political party could dare to mislead the country by wearing the mask of secularism."
  • Narendra Modi quoted from PM Modi delivers victory speech: Highlights TIMESOFINDIA.COM | May 23, 2019

• When Sadhvi Ritambhara, a pro-Janmabhoomi campaigner (a cassette of a speech of hers was banned), tells an interviewer: "Politicians appease [the Muslims] at every step, while the Hindus are taken for granted. We can't even teach our children our religion in schools", the interviewer replies : "But this is a secular nation". No, in these circumstances it is not a secular nation. Either secular means anti-religious, and then all religion teaching should be banned from schools, also that of the minorities. Or secular means religiously neutral, and then the state should leave all the religions the same right to impart religious education in schools, including the Hindus. Passing off this communal discrimination as secular, is a very crude lie indeed.
  • Sadhvi Ritambhara. Quoted from Elst, Koenraad (1991). Ayodhya and after: Issues before Hindu society.

• Do we realise how that hastily-ordered ban [on the book The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie] has changed India forever? .... When the Government promptly submitted to this illiterate hysteria, it convinced [Hindus] that secularism had become a code phrase for Muslim appeasement.
  • Vir Sanghvi: Liberal first, secular second. Sunday, 27.2.1994, quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2001). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa. p. 32-33

• Though borrowed from the West, secularism in India served a different end. In the West, it was directed against the clergy, tyrannical rulers, and had therefore a liberating role; in India, it was designed and actually used by Macaulayites to keep down the Hindus, the victims of two successive imperialisms expending over a thousand years. In the West, it opposed the Church which claimed to be the sole custodian of truth, which took upon itself the responsibility of dictating science and ordering thought, which decided when the world was created, whether the earth is flat or round, whether the sun or the earth moves round the other, which gave definitive conclusions on all matters and punished and dissent. But in India, secularism was directed against Hinduism which made no such claims, which laid down no dogmas and punished no dissent, which fully accepted the role of reason and unhampered inquiry in all matters, spiritual and secular; which encouraged viewing things from multiple angles - Syadvada (for which there is no true English word) was only a part of this larger speculative and venturesome approach... There is yet another difference. In the West, the struggle for secularism called for sacrifice and suffering-remember the imprisonments, the stakes, the Index; remember the condemnation of Galileo; remember how Bruno, Lucilio Vanini, Francis Kett, Bartholomew Legate, Wightman and others were burnt at the stake. But in India secularism has been a part of the Establishment, first of the British and then of our own self-alienated rulers. It has been used against Hinduism which has nourished a great spirit and culture of tolerance, free inquiry and intellectual.... Religious harmony is a desirable thing. But it takes two to play the game. Unfortunately such a sentiment holds a low position in Islamic theology... Secularism has become a name for showing one's distance from this great religion and culture. Macaulayites and Marxists also use it for Hindu- baiting... More than the policy of divide and rule, the British followed another favourite policy, the policy of creating privileged enclaves and ruling the masses with the help of those policies were embraced in their fullness by our new rulers-the rules of the game did not change simple because the British left.
  • Ram Swarup, "Seeing through Indian secularism", in: Koenraad Elst, Ayodhya and After: Issues Before Hindu Society (1991), Appendix II

• But there is an even more potent cause for the near total erasure of such material from our public discourse and our instruction. And that is the form of “secularism” which we have practised these forty-five years: a “secularism” in which double-standards have been the norm, one in which everything that may remove the dross by which our national identity has been covered has become anathema.
  • Arun Shourie - Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

• Some have seen in his approach a reaction to Islam’s assertiveness. In response to the suggestion that Hindus are behaving like Islamists, the one-time journalist and former BJP minister Arun Shourie commented tartly: ‘In a word, three things are teaching the Hindus to become Islamic: the double-standards of the secularists and the State, the demonstrated success of the Muslims in bending both the State and the secularists by intimidation, and the fact that both the State and the secularists pay attention to the sentiments of Hindus only when the Hindus become a little Islamic… [My] forecast: the more the secularists insist on double-standards, the more Islamic will the Hindus become.’
  • Arun Shourie, quoted from Shashi Tharoor, Why I am a Hindu, 2018

• Indian secularism consists of branding others communal.
  • Shourie, Arun (2005). A secular agenda: For saving our country, for welding it. New Delhi, India: Rupa

• Because Hindus fear the Muslims, they have fallen on the path of secularism. Each time they were conquered by Muslim soldiers, they have learnt to sink and bend like powerless blades of grass. This can be seen several times in our history.
  • — Syed Shahbuddin: Sunday, 20 March 1983. Paraphrased. Quoted in Balakrishna : The Worst Nightmare of the Congress Party is the Building of the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya

• While our leaders and the Supreme Court keep chanting, ‘All religions are one’; while they keep recalling the Vedic pronouncement, ‘Truth is one, only the sages call it by different names’; while they keep recalling Ashoka’s rock edict, ‘One who reveres one’s own religion and disparages that of another, due to devotion to one’s own religion and to glorify it over all others, does injure one’s own religion certainly’, the ulema proclaim the very opposite set of values, the truly Islamic values to be fair to the ulema. Thus we have Maulana Ahmad Riza Khan descend as an avalanche on persons who countenance processions in which books like the Gita and Quran are carried with equal respect; he declares that for a Muslim to even say, ‘Hindus should live by the Vedas, Muslims should live by the Quran,’ is kufr; a temple is the abode of Satans, he says, a Muslim is forbidden from going into it; to describe the Holy Quran as being like the Veda is kufr; to say that Hindus should live by the Veda is to ask people to follow kufr, and to ask people to follow kufr is kufr... The condescension, the picture which is drawn of Hindus and other non-believers, their being clubbed with animals and vermin—any text doing this in the case of Muslims would call forth howls of denunciation. From the secularists as much as from Muslims.
  • Arun Shourie - The World of Fatwas Or The Sharia in Action (2012, Harper Collins)

• "Indian 'secularism' is basically a linear descendant of Leftist ideology, and derives its inspiration from Leftist terminology and thought categories, so that 'secularism' boils down to anti-Hinduism"
  • S. Talageri, The Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism (1993) (TALAGERI 1993:10).

• Hindu India, Secular India.
  • VHP. Slogan used in ads by the Vishva Hindu Parishad published in some papers in 1990. Quoted from Elst, Koenraad (1991). Ayodhya and after: Issues before Hindu society.

• Now that the Chief Minister of Bihar has dragged 'succularism' into the political discourse, it is time to deconstruct it so that we can end this pointless debate once and for all. I have deliberately misspelt the word because when said in Hindi that is how it is usually pronounced. It is a hard word to write in devnagri and the Hindi and Urdu equivalents do not quite mean what secularism has come to mean in the Indian political context. It is a foreign word that evolved in a European context when the powers of the church and the state were separated. In India, since none of our religions were led by pontiffs who controlled armies, or had vast temporal powers, we had no need to make this separation. But, the word secularism is used in India more than almost any other country. Why? Well, because when we entered our current era of coalition governments, political parties of leftist disposition found it convenient to keep the BJP out of power by saying they would only ally with 'succular phorces'. The BJP became a pariah after the Babri Masjid came down and so whenever someone like Nitish Kumar wants to hurl abuse at the party he is in alliance with in Bihar, or one of its leaders, the 'secularism' debate gets revived. When I heard Aung San Suu Kyi's address to both houses of Britian's Parliament in Westminster hall last week, what impressed me was the clarity with which she spelt out her vision for her country. But, throughout her speech, something kept bothering me and by the time she finished, I discovered what it was. What bothered me was that I could not think of a single Indian leader who could make such a speech. The Indian political landscape today has become a desert in which only the stunted progeny of stunted political leaders bloom. We need our political parties to throw up real leaders and we need a political discourse in which real political problems are discussed. So can we stop fishing 'secularism' out of the dustbin of history and holding it up as a shining ideal? Its relevance faded a long time ago.
  • Tavleen Singh : Sun Jun 24 2012, Not ‘Secularism’ again [6]

• “Independent government implemented secularism mostly by refusing to recognise the religious pasts of Indian nationalism, whether Hindu or Muslim and at the same time (inconsistently) by retaining Muslim ‘personal law’.”
  • Ronald Inden in his work, “Imagining India.”quoted in Adrija Roychowdhury. Secularism: Why Nehru dropped and Indira inserted the S-word in the Constitution. | New Delhi | August 5, 2018 [7]

• “are we really honest when we say that we are seeking to establish a secular state? If your idea is to have a secular state it follows inevitably that we cannot afford to recognise minorities based upon religion.”
  • H C Mookherjee. Vice president of the drafting committee .quoted in Adrija Roychowdhury. Secularism: Why Nehru dropped and Indira inserted the S-word in the Constitution. | New Delhi | August 5, 2018 [8]

• “Since ‘Enlightenment Secularism’, with its core principle of separation, founded on the Protestant conception of religion as essentially a private concern with which states had no legitimate business, was never going to work in a country where rulers and religious publics had been interacting from time immemorial, it was better not to use the term at all, than to use it fraudulently.”
  • Ian Copland. quoted in Adrija Roychowdhury. Secularism: Why Nehru dropped and Indira inserted the S-word in the Constitution. | New Delhi | August 5, 2018 [9]

• On June 26, 1975, prime minister Indira Gandhi announced on the All India Radio that “the president has proclaimed Emergency.” .... The 42nd amendment came soon after. This 20 pages long detailed document gave unprecedented powers to the Parliament. Almost all parts of the Constitution, including the preamble, was changed with this amendment. Thereafter the description of India in the preamble was changed from “sovereign, democratic republic’ to a ‘sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic.”
  • Adrija Roychowdhury. Secularism: Why Nehru dropped and Indira inserted the S-word in the Constitution. | New Delhi | August 5, 2018 [10]

Deleted quotes

• India has survived as a secular nation because the majority is Hindu.
  • Javed Habib, India Today, 15/12/1990. Jawed Habib, President of the Babri Masjid Action Committee, and editor of popular Urdu weekly Hujoom. Quoted from Elst, Koenraad (1991). Ayodhya and after: Issues before Hindu society.

• I do not know the meaning of the secularism. Yet I do not understand. Of course the dictionary meaning is absolutely different. There was a time when people were talking about the secularism, they were about the simply [sic] religious harmony. Slowly it changed the colour. Then, secularism means a lip sympathy to the minorities. Then slowly the colour changed. Then, secularism was [...] means appeasement to the minorities. Then the secularism changed the colour. Focus only on the Muslims' votebank in the name of secularism. Then the secularism changed the colour. Then, hate Hindu means secularism.
  • Narendra Modi, Speech 14 January 2008 (on YouTube). Speech commemorating the 38th anniversary of Thuglak.

• Because Hindus fear the Muslims, they have fallen on the path of secularism. Each time they were conquered by Muslim soldiers, they have learnt to sink and bend like powerless blades of grass. This can be seen several times in our history.
  • — Syed Shahbuddin: Sunday (magazine), 20 March 1983. Paraphrased. Translated from Dr. S.R. Ramaswamy’s preface to the Kannada original, Bharatiya Kshaatra Parampare. Quoted in Balakrishna : The Worst Nightmare of the Congress Party is the Building of the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya [11] [12]

As far as I know, Nehru never defined secularism in its proper European and historical context.~Girilal Jain

I do not know the meaning of the secularism. Yet I do not understand. Of course the dictionary meaning is absolutely different.~Narendra Modi

Do we realise how that hastily-ordered ban [on the book The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie] has changed India forever? .... When the Government promptly submitted to this illiterate hysteria, it convinced [Hindus] that secularism had become a code phrase for Muslim appeasement. ~ Vir Sanghvi

Hindu India, Secular India. ~ Slogan of the VHP

Though borrowed from the West, secularism in India served a different end. In the West, it was directed against the clergy, tyrannical rulers, and had therefore a liberating role; in India, it was designed and actually used by Macaulayites to keep down the Hindus, the victims of two successive imperialisms expending over a thousand years. In the West, it opposed the Church which claimed to be the sole custodian of truth, which took upon itself the responsibility of dictating science and ordering thought, which decided when the world was created, whether the earth is flat or round, whether the sun or the earth moves round the other, which gave definitive conclusions on all matters and punished and dissent.... But in India secularism has been a part of the Establishment, first of the British and then of our own self-alienated rulers. ~ Ram Swarup

Secularism per se is a doctrine which arose in the modem West as a revolt against the closed creed of Christianity. Its battle-cry was that the State should be freed from the stranglehold of the Church, and the citizen should be left to his own individual choice in matters of belief... Had India borrowed this doctrine from the modem West, it would have meant a rejection of the closed creeds of Islam and Christianity, and a promotion of the Sanatana Dharma family of faiths which have been naturally secularist in the modern Western sense. ~ Sita Ram Goel

Independent government implemented secularism mostly by refusing to recognise the religious pasts of Indian nationalism, whether Hindu or Muslim and at the same time (inconsistently) by retaining Muslim ‘personal law’.~ Ronald Inden

In the West, secularism implies pinpricking religious fraud and arrogance, but in India, secularists are the most eloquent defenders of myth and theocracy. ~ Koenraad Elst

Are we really honest when we say that we are seeking to establish a secular state? If your idea is to have a secular state it follows inevitably that we cannot afford to recognise minorities based upon religion. ~H. C. Mookherjee.