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Secularism in India "I do not expect India of my dreams to develop one religion, i.e., to be wholly Hindu or wholly Christian or wholly Mussalman, but I want it to be wholly tolerant, with its religions working side by side with one another.'' So said Mahatma Gandhi. India has been declared a secular state by its written constitution and it is every Indian's duty to stand by and believe in this declaration. And yet recent political and social events have questioned this decla...ration. Is India a secular country only on paper or does secularism actually exist in India; or is in the form of pseudo-secularism, a term the BJP and its allies seem to repeatedly harp on. During the freedom struggle, secularism was emerging as the most dominant principle. The leaders of the Indian National Congress; Gandhi, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Nehru, and others were deeply committed to the ideal of secularism, though each expressed it in very different manners. Secularism became the mantra of the Indian nation, a nation exhausted by partition and sectarian riots and above all the assassination of Gandhiji, did not want any more divisive talk. The founding fathers represented the aspirations of the different sections of society and it is due to the struggles of these different people that secular principles got enshrined into the Indian constitution. Under Jawaharlal Nehru and later under his successors in the Congress Party, the concept of a secular nation-state was officially adopted as India's path to political modernity and national integration. Unlike in the West, where secularism came mainly out of the conflict between the Church and the State, secularism in India was conceived as a system that sustained religious and cultural pluralism. India has been declared a secular state by its written constitution and it is every Indian's duty to stand by and believe in this declaration. And yet recent political and social events have questioned this declaration. Is India a secular country only on paper or does secularism actually exist in India; or is in the form of pseudo-secularism, a term the BJP and its allies seem to repeatedly harp on. Source-Civilserviceindia "A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song."