You write: “... it may be more to the point if we cleared away the multiple laws of majority and minority religious code and drafted an entirely fresh secular code applicable to all Indian citizens alike. That may bring back the ethical in our thinking.”

A secular society is not one that only insists on all religions coexisting. All religions must also have equal status and citizens must have the right to practice whichever one they chose to. But a secular society requires other inputs if it is to be secular. It is also a society that has secular civil laws. They must be laws that underline as primary, the rights of citizens and the presence of the ethical. Secular laws pertaining to birth, marriage and inheritance, must replace the existing religious customary laws and what are regarded as laws legitimized by religion. Differentiated religious laws being incorporated into civil codes undermines secular society. Eventually a new civil code should replace the religious codes and be brought into practice.

The secularization of society is essential to ensure the existence of democracy. The need for the secular is not just to enable us to say that we are not a theocratic state, but is essential to the functioning of democracy. Democratic systems cannot exist where there are predetermined religious majority and minority groups that are treated as fundamental to the functioning of democratic institutions, such as in elections to the Lok Sabha. We have been combining religion and politics by observing laws that claim religious sanctity as the basis of civil laws. This is an impediment in a multi-religious society.