As for “equal respect to all religions”, everybody knows that if you respect one religion, you cannot respect any other. What in reality is being asked is this: irrespective of your beliefs you should, at least in public, pretend to ‘show respect’ for the other person’s religion. Or at least don’t do anything to provoke him. Apparently religious people have a divine right to get provoked more easily than those who follow no faith. Equal respect to all religions encourages bad blood between faiths and is therefore responsible for causing riots. Besides, it can be deliberately misunderstood to mean that all religions are encouraged: ‘respect’ being the operative word. This, in effect, is competitive obscurantism.

Secularists in India skirt around the problem to avoid ‘giving offence’ to religionists. Everybody respects the religionist’s right to give offence in ‘defence’ of his faith. Therefore you have a right to get angry in defence of unreason. But I do not have a corresponding right to defend reason. By implication unreason is respectable, and should be respected, and reason is not and should not be respected.

The word ‘secular’ in our Constitution is not clearly defined. This has led to politically correct expressions like ‘equal respect to all religions’. When a president or PM attends a public religious ceremony it is not just the person who does so but the office he/she occupies. We should enact a law that says that once a person occupies a high office he should not attend a public religious ceremony so long as he is in office. He should, of course, be free, as a citizen of this country to pray to his various gods in the privacy of his home.

The secular person can only be heard above the din of unreason if he maintains a sustained campaign in favour of reason and secularism. We need a more assertive secularism in India in favour of liberal values and against religious obscurantism of any colour. It is time secular people stood up and told the rest that what they are doing goes against their freedom to live in peace. And it is time the Constitution openly stood by the secularist, and the agnostic in view of what its own Preamble states.