Most adults don’t understand secularism the way in which children are taught to, the political commentator said.
Bengaluru: The best lesson for India on secularism may be in a class eight textbook, making students the best to speak up about what it really is, said policy expert and commentator Meghnad S.
“Why aren’t our eighth graders speaking out?” he said at the second edition of Democracy Wall.
“This is what an eighth grader thinks of Indian secularism – a masjid, a mosque, a gurudwara, something like a church, two dudes making out, a Sikh dude and a girl,” Meghnad said showing a picture from the textbook.
“Now if you ask an adult to draw what secularism means to them, there’ll be an Arnab Goswami on top of that temple, and they’ll probably copy paste the temple on top of the masjid,” he said.
Democracy Wall is a monthly free speech campus initiative organised by ThePrint in collaboration with Facebook. The second edition of the event at Jain University in Bengaluru featured Meghnad, Congress leader Sachin Pilot, rapper Sofia Ashraf, actor Huma Qureshi, IPS official D. Roopa, lawyer expert Manasa Venkataraman and comedian Aravind S.A.
The importance of fixing politics in India
Meghnad also spoke about how India had laws that force lawmakers to go against their conscience, the most important being the anti-defection law.
“If an MP gets an order from a party chief to vote, he has to follow it otherwise he will be kicked out. Does this make sense?” he said.
Speaking about the state of Indian democracy today, Meghnad said it was like a broken stage where your favourite actor will come and perform on stage. However, because the stage was broken, the actor will stumble and fall.
The audience will laugh and make memes, he said.
“Why don’t we fix the stage so we can see our actors perform better?” Meghnad said.