When PM Narendra Modi mockingly stated in Japan that ‘secular’ people would disapprove of his gifting the Bhagwad Gita to Emperor Akihito, he seemed to echo what has become a caricatured version of secularism, namely an un-Indian cult decrying anything remotely ‘Hindu’. In the early 1990s Congressman V N Gadgil wrote how he incurred secular wrath simply for breaking a coconut at a public function. Today this ‘silly secularism’ is its own cult, with its high priests, its orthodoxy and its intolerance of dissent.
Its intolerance is similar to the Hindutva cult, with its raging commanders, a cult where all questioning is banned, leading jurist Fali Nariman to recently remark that the benign face of Hinduism is being usurped. The diatribes Read More
