Since this column is often wrongly accused of nurturing ill-feelings towards Islam, I use the chance this week to show that I bear equal ill-will towards any religion that tries to occupy the public space. How someone chooses to worship in private does not interest me, but as the citizen of a secular country, I refuse to accept the right of priests and religious people to impose their faith, sartorial tastes, and morals upon the rest of us.

Last week it was the turn of Sikhs to launch forth into the public arena. They took to the streets in huge numbers wearing medieval costumes and brandishing swords because of some imagined insult to Guru Govind Singh. They looked like lunatics on the loose and as a Sikh, I was extremely irritated to see the religion I was brought up in turned into a mockery.

Who are these people? How dare they think they have a right to speak on behalf of all Sikhs? Personally, I was discomfited by the fanatical gleam in the eyes of young men who should have better things to do than to run around brandishing swords and unkempt beards. And over what? Some little Baba in some little Punjab town wears an outfit that supposedly resembles the clothes Guru Govind Singh liked to wear! And we are expected to believe that this was good enough reason for this public display of religious hysteria?

Where were the keepers of law and order? Is it not an offence to wander the streets waving swords? Why were these protests permitted in cities across Punjab? Is it because the Akali government is taking revenge on Baba Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh for urging his followers to vote Congress in the recent Assembly elections? If it is, then the Akalis have learned nothing from the mistakes of the past. Mistakes for which thousands of innocent people died terrible deaths at the hands of terrorists because some fools in positions of power thought religion and politics made a good mix.

Whenever religion moves beyond private worship to the public space this happens. Thousands of Indians have died in riots caused by religion, India was divided because religion was allowed to intervene in matters that should have been restricted to politics and still we appear to have learned no lessons. We make no objections to our political leaders consorting with religious men who range from the dangerous to the bizarre.

Remember that Baba from Mathura whose blessings came in the form of a kick on the head of visiting dignitaries? Remember the dignitaries who lined up to be kicked? One of them was India’s home minister. Unusually for a religious person the kicking Baba seems to have had a secret sense of humour.

My aversion to religion being allowed to occupy the public arena is also because it brings forth a particularly loathsome type of righteous person. The sort of person who believes he has the divine right to become arbiter of public morals by using violence and intimidation if necessary. The Indian state is easily brought to its knees by this kind of ‘righteousness’ and films and books have been banned on account of it, but the real laboratory of loathsome righteousness is Narenda Modi’s Gujarat.

We saw it in action at the M.S . University’s Faculty of Fine Arts, Vadodara, in the Chandramohan incident. Instead of locking up the busybody who went poking his nose into other people’s paintings, the Modi government arrested the student whose painting the busybody found offensive.

Modi is famous for being loathsomely righteous in the name of Hindutva, but this time he exceeded his own high standards by showing the world — as the sword-waving Sikhs did — that secular India is no different from the worst kind of Islamic state. The annoying thing about the loathsomely righteous is also that they are usually stupid, so they demanded a ban on Fanaa because Aamir Khan commiserated with Medha Patkar when she fasted against the Narmada Dam.

If they had been more intelligent they would have noticed that if there was reason to demand a ban it should have been because the film’s hero is a terrorist who steals a nuclear device from the Indian army. With Parzania they failed to notice that the film lied about Godhra.

The only way to stop being held to ransom by people who should not have any right in a secular country to occupy the public space is for the state to ensure that religion remains a private affair. When sword-waving Sikhs take to the streets, they should be arrested, as should fatwa-issuing maulvis and hate-spewing Hindu fanatics. They violate the secular principles on which India is built and if that is not an offence I do not know what is.