A Question of Source
Ask most people why India is secular and they will point to a document. The Preamble, they say. Articles 25 to 28, they say. The word “secular” itself, added to the Preamble by the 42nd Amendment in 1976. These are real and important. But they answer a smaller question than the one worth asking.
The deeper question is this: why was a newly independent India, carved out of a partition that was fought over religion, able to write a Constitution that gave no state religion and equal freedom to all faiths? Why did the country next door, born from the same soil in the same year, choose differently?
The argument of this essay is simple. India is not secular merely because of its Constitution. India is secular because of its culture, and the heart of that culture is Hindu. A civilisation whose foundational texts teach that truth is one and the paths to it are many will, when it gains the power to write its own laws, write laws that protect many paths. The Constitution is the fruit. The Hindu mind is the root.
A Fact That Cannot Be Wished Away
According to the 2011 Census, about 79.8 percent of Indians are Hindu. The Constituent Assembly that framed the Constitution between 1946 and 1949 had a large Hindu majority. The leaders who led the drafting and the debates were overwhelmingly drawn from that majority, and so were most of the voters who backed them.
Here is the point that deserves to be stated plainly. A majority that held the numbers, held the Assembly and held the moral prestige of the freedom movement could have written a Hindu state. It did not. It wrote a state that treats a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a Sikh, a Buddhist, a Jain, a Parsi and a Jew as equal citizens. Majorities rarely choose to bind themselves this way. When one does, the explanation lies in what that majority believes at its core.
Secularism in India Is Not Secularism in Europe
Western secularism was born from a particular wound: the long war between Church and State. It was a treaty to end the domination of one institution over another. India had no Church, no single book of authority binding all Hindus, no pope, no inquisition, no centralised priesthood that the State had to be protected from.
Indian secularism grew from a different soil. It is not the wall between religion and state. It is the equal respect of all religions, sometimes called Sarva Dharma Sambhava. Even the Supreme Court has described India’s version as distinct from the Western model, one that fits the diversity of the country. In the landmark S.R. Bommai case of 1994, a nine-judge bench held that secularism is part of the basic structure of the Constitution. In November 2024 the Court dismissed a challenge to the words “secular” and “socialist” in the Preamble and observed that the Preamble in its original form already reflected a secular ethos even before 1976.
That observation is the hinge of this entire argument. If the secular ethos was already present in 1950 before the word was written, then it did not come from the word. It came from the people who wrote the document and the civilisation that shaped them.
What the Vedas Say: One Truth, Many Paths
Start with the oldest text in the Hindu canon. In the Rigveda (1.164.46) there is a line that has become the motto of Indian pluralism:
एकं॒ सद्विप्रा॑ बहु॒धा व॑दन्त्य॒ग्निं
Meaning: Truth is one; the wise speak of it in many ways.
This is not a modern slogan. It is among the oldest recorded statements in the world that the divine can be named, approached and understood in more than one way, and that the difference of names is not a difference of truth. A civilisation that begins its scripture here has already answered, at the level of principle, the question that tears other societies apart: what do we do about people who worship differently?
The Rigveda (1.89.1) offers a prayer with the same openness of mind:
आ नो॑ भ॒द्राः क्रत॑वो यन्तु वि॒श्वतो
Meaning: Let noble thoughts come to us from every side.
Note the direction: From every side. Not from one book, one prophet or one school. The seekers of the Vedic age asked to be fed by wisdom from all quarters.
The Rigveda (10.191.2) goes from thought to society:
सं ग॑च्छध्वं॒ सं व॑दध्वं॒ सं वो॒ मनां॑सि जानताम्
Meaning: Move together, speak together, let your minds be in harmony.
This is a call to concord, not to uniformity. Walking together does not require being identical.
The Atharvaveda carries this into a theory of the nation itself. In the Prithvi Sukta (12.1.45) the Earth is described as bearing people who speak many languages and follow many dharmas, as a household holds many members:
जनं बिभ्रती बहुधा विवाचसं नानाधर्माणम् पृथिवी यथौकसं।
Janam bibhrati bahudha vivachasam nanadharmanam prithivi yathaukasam
Meaning: The Earth bears people of many tongues and many faiths, as one home holds its family.
Here, thousands of years before any modern constitution, a sacred hymn describes the land as the home of many dharmas and treats that diversity as natural and worthy of the Earth’s care. It is hard to find a more direct textual foundation for a multi-faith nation.
The Upanishads: The Whole World as Family
The Maha Upanishad (6.71), which gave India its enduring phrase, draws a line between a narrow mind and a large one:
अयं निजः परो वेति गणना लघुचेतसाम्।
उदारचरितानां तु वसुधैव कुटुम्बकम्॥Ayam nijah paro veti ganana laghuchetasam
Udaracharitanam tu vasudhaiva kutumbakam
Meaning: “This one is ours, that one is a stranger” is the calculation of small minds. For those of generous character, the whole earth is one family.
Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam is not a decoration. It is a moral test. It says the person who divides humanity into ours and theirs by faith has a small heart. A tradition that treats such division as a mark of narrowness has ethical resources against communal hatred inside itself.
The Isha Upanishad (verse 6) takes the idea inward:
यस्तु सर्वाणि भूतान्यात्मन्यॆवानुपश्यति ।
सर्वभूतॆषु चात्मानं ततॊ न विजुगुप्सतॆ ॥ ६ ॥Yastu sarvani bhutani atmanyevanupashyati
Sarvabhuteshu chatmanam tato na vijugupsate
Meaning: One who sees all beings in the Self, and the Self in all beings, feels no hatred because of it.
If the same divine presence is seen in every being, then discrimination against a neighbour’s faith is, in this view, a failure of spiritual sight.
The Gita: God Accepts Every Path
The Bhagavad Gita is perhaps the most widely read Hindu scripture, and it states the principle of religious acceptance in words that leave little room for exclusivism. In the Gita (4.11) Krishna says:
ये यथा मां प्रपद्यन्ते तांस्तथैव भजाम्यहम् ।
मम वर्त्मानुवर्तन्ते मनुष्या: पार्थ सर्वश: ॥Ye yatha mam prapadyante tams tathaiva bhajamyaham
Mama vartmanuvartante manushyah partha sarvashah
Meaning: However people approach me, so do I receive them. All paths, in every way, lead people to me.
In the Gita (7.21) the Lord says that whatever form a devotee chooses to worship with faith, it is He who steadies that faith. In the Gita (9.23) it is said that even those who worship other deities with faith are, in truth, worshipping the same Supreme, though not by the prescribed way.
Read these verses with care. They do not say that all paths are merely tolerated. They say the Divine itself receives the worshipper on whatever path he walks. A tradition whose most beloved text says this cannot, without contradicting itself, make the State an instrument for forcing one path on everyone.
And in the Gita (12.13) the ideal devotee is described:
अद्वेष्टा सर्वभूतानां मैत्र: करुण एव च ।
Meaning: One who hates no being, who is friendly and compassionate to all.
The saint of the Gita is defined by the absence of hatred. That is a civic ideal as much as a spiritual one.
The Puranas: A Civilisation of Many Gods and Many Doors
The Puranas are often misread as a record of rivalry between deities. Read as a whole they do the opposite. They show a tradition in which Shiva, Vishnu and the Devi are each presented as supreme in their own texts, and in which devotees of each are taught to honour the others. Hindu society never needed to settle which of its own gods was the one true God. It learned to live with a plurality at home, and that habit became the training ground for living with plurality outside.
The Bhagavata Purana (11.2.45) describes the highest devotee as the one who sees the Divine in all beings:
सर्वभूतेषु य: पश्येद् भगवद्भावमात्मन: ।
भूतानि भगवत्यात्मन्येष भागवतोत्तम: ॥Sarvabhuteshu yah pashyed bhagavad-bhavam atmanah
Bhutani bhagavaty-atmanyesha bhagavatottamah
Meaning: The best devotee sees the presence of God in all beings, and all beings in God.
The same spirit appears in the devotional hymn known as the Shiva Mahimna Stotra, which, though not itself a Purana, belongs to the same stream of Puranic devotion. It compares the many paths of humankind, straight and crooked, to many rivers that all flow into the one ocean. The image of rivers and sea is so common in Hindu literature that it has become the everyday way Hindus explain religion to their children.
History Is the Proof
If the texts were the whole story, a sceptic could say that scripture and practice are different things. So look at practice.
The Jews of Cochin tell, by their own tradition, of a welcome from the local ruler in Kerala, centuries before any Western state granted Jews equal standing. The Syrian Christians of Kerala trace their community to the earliest centuries of the Christian era and lived and traded alongside their Hindu neighbours for over a millennium. The Parsis, according to their own account of the Sanjan landing, fled Persia and were given refuge on the Gujarat coast, where they prospered and became among the most successful communities in modern India. In none of these cases is the story one of a single faith fleeing the land. It is the story of persecuted faiths fleeing toward it.
Add to this the fact that Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism were born on this soil, grew alongside Hindu society, and share its civilisational vocabulary of dharma and karma. Hindu kings built temples and also endowed monasteries of other faiths. Debate among philosophical schools, including those that denied the Vedas outright, was part of the intellectual life of ancient India.
Hindu society was not a society without conflict. No society is. But it never developed a theology of conversion by the sword, nor a doctrine that the unbeliever has no right to live. That absence, more than any clause in a statute, is why the pluralism of India has survived.
The Partition Test
The strongest evidence comes from the moment of decision. In 1947 the subcontinent was divided on the argument that religion should define a nation. One half chose that logic. The other half, with an overwhelming Hindu majority, chose the opposite.
The leaders of the Indian Republic could have said: since the other side has taken a religious state, we shall take ours. They did not. Many Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and others stayed in India precisely because they trusted that the majority community would honour a promise of equal citizenship. That trust was not placed in the Constitution alone, which did not yet exist. It was placed in the character of the people.
The Constitution as a Mirror
When the Constituent Assembly debated religious freedom, it wrote Article 25, guaranteeing freedom of conscience and the right to profess, practise and propagate religion. Article 26 protected religious denominations. Article 27 and 28 limited compulsory religious payments and instruction in State institutions. Article 15 forbade discrimination on grounds of religion. These provisions, along with the Preamble’s promise of liberty of belief, faith and worship, were in place from 1950.
The 42nd Amendment of 1976 added the word “secular” to the Preamble. Critics noted it was passed during the Emergency. But the Supreme Court has held repeatedly that secularism was already part of the basic structure, and the nation has never repealed the idea. The word did not create the principle. It named what was already there.
A constitution can be amended, suspended or ignored. A culture cannot be repealed by a vote. If India’s secularism rested only on the text, it would be as fragile as the text. It rests on something older and sturdier: the settled temperament of a people who, in the main, believe that no one has the right to dictate the path another soul takes to the Divine.
Conclusion
Strip away the clauses and the case law and ask what actually holds India together as a country where a mosque, a church, a gurdwara and a temple can stand within a short walk of one another. The answer, argued here, is not the State’s neutrality alone. It is a civilisational habit, taught in the Vedas, ratified in the Upanishads, lived through the Gita and the Puranas, and carried by ordinary Hindus who never read a constitution but who greet a neighbour’s festival with sweets.
India is secular because Hindu society is, at its core, accepting of all. The Constitution did not teach India to respect many faiths. India taught the Constitution.
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