Shashi Tharoor

All four generations of Nehrus in public life remained secular in outlook and conduct. Their appeal transcended caste, region, and religion, something almost impossible to say of any other leading Indian politician during Nehru’s life or afterward.

There could be no starker indication of the end of Nehruvianism that, fifty-five years after partition and independence, religion has again become a key determinant of political identity in India. Yet it can be argued that “Hindutva” has become a credible political movement precisely because of the nature of the strategy pursued by the Indian state since independence in relation to its religious communities.

Nehru’s ostensibly secular Indian state granted major concessions to its minority religions, organised not just as religions but as social communities.

Personal law, on matters concerning worship, marriage, inheritance, and divorce, was left to the religious leaders of each community to maintain and interpret; the state passed no law to alter or abridge Muslim personal law, even though Parliament, through the Hindu Code Bill, radically transformed Hindu society in these areas as early as 1956. Educational and cultural institutions of religious minorities are subsidised (in some cases almost entirely funded) by state grants; these include even explicitly religious schools.

Muslim divines and preachers routinely receive government grants, and the government disburses considerable sums annually on arranging for them to travel on the annual Haj pilgrimage to Mecca. Indeed, despite the fact that a political party organised on religious lines had partitioned the country, the government did nothing to discourage political mobilisation on the basis of religion, so that the rump of Jinnah’s Muslim League not only continued to be active in independent India, but even became an electoral ally of the Congress Party (in Kerala).

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