The UPA government’s initial management of the affidavit on the Sethusamudram project was marked by that familiar ineptness and it gave the BJP and the Sangh Parivar an issue to take to the streets — as they did on Wednesday. The Congress’s course correction is therefore evidence that the party may be finally learning some of the lessons from its own past. As our columnist argues, state secularism — as it has been conceived in India and in other parts of the world — isn’t constructed to interrogate faith but merely to show equal respect to every faith within the country. It could even be argued that a more rigid definition of secularism may have seen the collapse of the secular state as we know it in India. So finally Union Law Minister Hans Raj Bhardwaj got to see the light, with some elbow from the Congress president. He demonstrated unsuspected depths of poetic imagination when he declared before the media on Thursday that “the existence of Rama cannot be doubted. As Himalaya is Himalaya; Ganga is Ganga; Rama is Rama”.

The BJP may certainly claim brownie points for having got the Congress to embrace Lord Rama; but the Congress, for its part, has managed to regain some ground that was rapidly slipping from under it and deprive its bete noire one potent talking point in the great echo chamber of Indian politics.