How should we react to the UPA withdrawing the now-forever-famous ASI affidavit? Not by moaning about the death of ‘rationality’ at the hands of a ‘secular’ government. But by re-recognising India. India has a secular state that presides over a deeply religious society. According to census data, there are almost 2.5 million places of worship in India. To put this figure in perspective, ask how many schools does India have? 1.5 million. Hospitals? Around 750,000.

When asked, ‘are you a religious person’, nearly 95 per cent of Indians say yes (World Values Survey findings, quoted in dozens of studies, including in an excellent book by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular). Full disclosure: I belong to the other five per cent of Indians.

India’s secular state doesn’t define itself by proclaiming that the state doesn’t care about religion. State secularism in India means the state respects all religions equally, that the state will not play favourites between religions. The state will only act, or at any rate is supposed to act, when social practices flowing from religion grossly contradict modernist precepts. That’s why caste, a key organising principle of Hindu society, was not legitimised by the Constitution. That’s why the continuing conflict between legal principles and Muslim personal law on issues like divorce and alimony. That’s why the Sethusamudram project can’t be stopped on grounds cited by the writ petitions at the Supreme Court. But the state in India is not in the business of interrogating faith per se.

... contd.