There is a strange irony sitting at the heart of Indian public life: a word that exists to keep the state out of the business of belief has itself become something close to a belief — a term so fortified by consensus that questioning it earns you a label before you've finished the sentence.
"Secular" is not in India's original 1950 Constitution. It entered through the 42nd Amendment in 1976, during the Emergency — added to a Preamble the Constituent Assembly had, in 1948, explicitly declined to write that way when K.T. Shah proposed something similar. That single fact tends to surprise people who assume the word has always been load-bearing.
What follows from there is a longer argument — about India's "positive secularism" and how it differs from the Western church-state separation it borrows its name from; about what Savarkar's 1923 pamphlet on Hindutva actually said before the word became a slur on one side and a rallying cry stripped of its original argument on the other; about the Shah Bano case and what it revealed about treating faiths as vote banks rather than citizens as rights-holders; about the 2025 sesquicentennial of Vande Mataram and the 2026 bill to grant it legal protections akin to the flag and anthem, and what that collision says about a country still negotiating the space between devotion and law.
This piece traces the word back to its Latin root — saeculum, the age, the temporal — and asks what gets lost when a framework built for one civilisation's church-state quarrel is transplanted onto a very different one. It is not an argument for abandoning secularism. It is an argument for being allowed to interrogate it without being cast out of the room for doing so. The tension between a plural society and a single, sacralised vocabulary for describing that pluralism is not a design flaw. It is the argument.
This essay appears in full on Twenty & Thinking's original publication. The summary above preserves its structure and central claims — read the complete piece below.