Secularism belongs to all faiths and social sections and to both sexes and there can be no discrimination against anyone on grounds of religion, caste, race, ethnicity, language and gender, N. Ram, Chairman, Kasturi & Sons Ltd., said here on Sunday.
In the backdrop of increasing incidence of communal violence, Mr. Ram said the constitutional guarantee of the special rights of religious and linguistic minorities was an extension of this equality-and-fairness principle.
“Secularism as the equality-and-fairness principle must be based on justice if it is to survive and flourish. The unmet demand for justice in India has many dimensions — the constitutional-political, the social, the economic, gender, and so on. Discrimination and the denial of elementary justice in these dimensions weaken and sap the practice of secularism,” he said, while delivering the 16th D.S. Borker Memorial Lecture.
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Critical of the idea of a “Hindu Rashtra”, a concept favoured by the right wing RSS, Mr. Ram said the ideology flagrantly denies this equality-fairness-and-justice principle.
He also raised questions on whether 67 years after gaining Independence, India had kept its tryst with destiny. “The path India took in 1947 was a brave experiment in trying to address underdevelopment and extreme deprivation in a large, highly populated, poor country, within the framework of parliamentary democracy. But the experiment largely failed Nehru’s litmus test – of ending poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity. What is worse, there is no indication that policy-makers have lost much sleep over the palpable reality of India having a greater mass of basic deprivations today than any other country on earth,” Mr. Ram added.