Ultimately, the problem is that we find less and less room in India for a middle ground between religion’s two extreme faces—one supremely constructive and the other morbidly destructive. Those squeezed in the middle are looked at suspiciously. Who can be labelled secular has become a great puzzle in India.
For one who holds secularism as a personal virtue, it means having no prejudice against any other community. But this is possible only if this person also has solid national institutions supporting this secularism. In India, however, secularism does not include an institutional commitment to upholding individual rights, freedom of expression, dignity, equal treatment by the state, and rule of law.
For one who nurtures secularism as a societal value, secularism means living in religious harmony. But even though India’s founding fathers had initially envisaged such an ethic for the nation, we have not been able to get past the bloody memories of Partition.
For those who see secularism as a political orientation, these days it popularly means subscribing to the Congress’s narrative of Indian history. But this is a fallacy as well. Indira and Rajiv Gandhi’s regimes took decisions which affected every minority community in India. I have written in this essay how there has been religious strife and conflict in different eras of India’s past, irrespective of which political party was in power. Only during elections are certain minorities appeased. And so in truth, in India, we do not have any national political party that we can really call secular.
For those who perceive secularism as a nationalist agenda, it demands putting India first. But this raises the important question: What is India? Do we define India by the ethno-territorial interpretation conceived by Veer Savarkar in the early years of the twentieth century?24 When Savarkar coined the term ‘Hindutva’, he believed it referred to a collective Hindu identity as an imagined nation. Clearly, we have given powers to religion—both constructive and destructive—that are larger than life. We choose to ignore the fact that every religion is merely a human creation. We forget that religion was founded as an early form of philosophy, as man’s attempts to explain the world and give some sort of a coherent frame of reference to life and how to lead it.
Instead, we have utterly complicated the matter, and allowed ourselves to be overpowered—for good or for bad—by a phenomenon of our own making. We have minimized the chances for anyone slipping out of the game. We have given legitimacy to religion’s monopoly on our ethics, and increasingly on our politics—and it is this deadly combination that we should collectively fight against.References
Business Today. 2016. India has highest number of people living below poverty line: World Bank. 3 October.
Cantegreil, Mathieu, Dweep Chanana and Ruth Kattumuri, eds. 2013. Revealing Indian Philanthropy (London: Alliance Publishing Trust).
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Dalrymple, William. 2015. The great divide. New Yorker, 29 June.
Indiatoday.in. 2016. Devotees to Tirupati get free food, water after 500, 1000 rupee notes banned. 10 November. http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/tirupati-tirumala-devasthanam-tirupati-demonetisation-of-500-and-1000-rupee-notes-temple-donations/1/807004.html.
Indian Express. 2017. Telangana CM KCR makes another massive donation—gold ornaments worth Rs 5.6 cr—at Tirupati temple. 22 February.
Janardhanan, Arun. 2017. Tamil Nadu youth killed for being an atheist, father says he too will become one. Indian Express, 27 March.
Kumar, Rohit. 2011. Vital stats: Communal violence in India. PRS Legislative Research: 1.
Lopez, Donald S. 1995. Religions of India in Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
NDTV. 2009. World’s richest temple adds gold, crores, and hopefully, Rahman. 2 December. https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/worlds-richest-temple-adds-gold-crores-and-hopefully-rahman-405921.
Nelson, Dean. 2014. Delhi to reopen inquiry into massacre of Sikhs in 1984 riots. Telegraph, 30 January.
News Minute. 2017. With 2.73 crore visitors in 2016, Tirumala temple sees pilgrim footfall rise. http://www.thenewsminute.com/article/273-crore-visitors-2016-tirumala-temple-sees-pilgrim-footfall-rise-55365.
Parrish, Andrew. 2016. Saudi Arabia spends 32 times the Vatican budget to spread Islam. Stream, 6 October.
TTD News. 2016. TTD approves Rs. 2678 crores annual budget for 2016–17. 30 January.
The Hindu. 2016. TTD approves Rs. 2,530-cr annual budget. 28 March.
Time. 2008. India’s temples go green. 7 July. http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1820844,00.html.
Times of India. 2009. Tirupati laddu gets global patent. 16 September.
11Corporations
India’s unique 24/7 corporate culture is in stark contrast to other laid-back aspects of the country. Indian corporates consider it a badge of honour to be busy, high-strung and available at all times to the call of duty. This is despite the facts that our government is sluggish when it comes to putting systems in place, courts procrastinate for years in many cases and the country ranks as one of the most difficult and slowest countries to start a new business in.1
It is considered a sign of success for exuberant Indian executives to be in an endless frenetic hustle. A ‘job’—once a smart solution invented by humans to earn a currency by which goods could be bartered now has the supreme power to shape lives. In a country that enjoys the largest number of public holidays in the world,2 executives consider ‘off day’ a dirty word, and hardly ever dream of taking a vacation. While it is an arduous task to find Indian government clerks at their desks during office hours, it is not uncommon to see corporate employees working round the clock all days of the week. We have even made a business out of this enthusiasm, grabbing $28 billion worth of global commerce a year by being the world’s largest base for ‘back offices’ working all through the day and night.3
In 2014, when I joined the Jindal Group, I had never worked in India, or for that matter, in an Indian company. For fourteen years previously, I had worked across eight countries—first in French politics, then at investment banks in New York, London and Paris, followed by Geneva at the World Economic Forum, which is known to be a highly political and complex organization.
