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Nehru, secularism, both as a personal philosophy and state policy,
was an expression of India's cultural- civilizational personality
and not its negation and repudiation. Secularism suited India's
requirements as he saw them. For instance, it provided an additional
legitimizing principle for reform movements among Hindus beginning
with the Brahmo Samaj in the early part of the nineteenth century.
It met the aspirations of the Westernized and modernizing
intelligentsia. Before independence, it denied legitimacy to Muslim
separatism in the eyes of Hindus, Westernized or traditionalist. If
it did not help forge an instrument capable of resisting effectively
the Muslim League's demand for partition, the alternative platform
of men such as Veer Savarkar did not avail either. After partition,
it served the same purpose of denying legitimacy to moves to
consolidate Muslims as a separate communalist political force.
Pandit Nehru's emphasis on secularism
has to be viewed not only in relation to the Muslim problem which
survived partition, but it has also to be seen in the context of his
plea for science and of India's need to get rid of the heavy and
deadening burden of rituals and superstitions, products of period of
grave weakness and hostile environment when nothing nobler than
survival was possible. Seen in this perspective, the ideologies of
so- cialism and secularism have served as mine sweepers. They have
cleared the field of dead conventions sufficiently to make it
possible for new builders to move in. Sheikh Abdullah exaggerated
when he charged Pandit Nehru with Machiavellianism, but he was not
too wide off the mark when he wrote in Aatish-e-Chinar that Nehru
was "a great admirer of the past heritage and the Hindu
spirit of India....He considered himself as an instrument of
rebuilding India with its ancient spirit" (quoted in
Jagmohan,My Frozen Turbulence in Kashmir) 1.
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