Note: The below excerpts are taken from Shashi Tharoor’s book India: From Midnight to the Millenium and Beyond.
My generation grew up in an India where our sense of nationhood lay in the simple thought: That the singular thing about India was that you could only speak of it in the plural. This pluralism emerged from the very nature of the country; it was made inevitable by India’s geography and reaffirmed by its history. There was simply too much of both to permit a single, exclusionist nationalism.
We were brought up to take this for granted, and to reject the communalism that had partitioned the nation when the British left. In rejecting the case for Pakistan, Indian nationalism also rejected the very idea that religion should be a determinant of nationhood. We never fell into the insidious trap of agreeing that, since Partition had established a state for the Muslims, what remained was the state for the Hindus. To accept the idea of India, you had to spurn the logic that had divided the country.
This was what that much-abused term secularism meant for us. Western dictionaries defined secularism as th absence of religion, but Indian secularism meant a profusion of religions, none of which was privileged by the state. Religion was too pervasive in the popular culture for unreligion to become public policy, despite the open agnosticism of Nehru. But the notion that religion had no place in public policy was easily accepted in India, where the distinction between God and Caesar had been enshrined since time immemorial.
Kalampedia 