It has become customary to announce the betrayal of secularism in India every few weeks. The culprit changes with the speaker: the BJP, the Congress before it, the courts, the media, the middle class. Every version assumes that there was once a working arrangement and that someone chose to abandon it. The truth is more uncomfortable than betrayal.
Indian secularism, as Jawaharlal Nehru conceived it, was only secondarily a doctrine about religion. Primarily it was a claim about knowledge that a State which is governed by evidence would, for that reason alone, owe nothing to any faith. The republic kept the first part of the claim, its reverence for science, and quietly dropped the second, the habit of reasoning that gave the reverence its point.
Secularism did not fall because it was attacked. It fell because the ground beneath it had been emptied out by the people who said they were guarding it.
The rational State as a middle path
Nehru’s secularism is now usually described by what it refused to be. It was not French laïcité, which removes religion from public space by statute, nor was it Soviet, which closed churches and taught atheism as a creed of State. And it was certainly not the Hindu State that Partition had made thinkable, and that a good many of Nehru’s own colleagues would have accepted without much distress. He rejected all three, and what he put in their place deserves more serious attention.
His wager was that rationality would do the work that legislation does elsewhere. A State that sited its dams by hydrology and planned its industry by economics would have no occasion to consult a priest. Secularism would follow from method in the way that impartiality follows from a properly controlled experiment. Religion could stay where it lived, in the home and the temple and the mosque, untroubled and unthreatened, because the State had other grounds for what it did. That is what made it a middle path.
Nehru described the scientific temperament as, among other things, the refusal to accept anything without testing and trial. He was describing a disposition, and he believed that disposition could become the common property of a society that had very little else in common. The Scientific Policy Resolution of 1958, which he placed before Parliament, turned the belief into institutional design.
The IITs, the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research laboratories, the Atomic Energy Commission, and later the Space Programme were meant to train a new kind of citizen as much as to produce new knowledge.
After Partition, the reasoning had an obvious urgency. Religious identity had just shown that it could mobilise killing faster than any constitutional appeal could restrain it. An authority that no faith could claim as its own looked like the only safe foundation for a State of that size, carrying that wound.
Reverence without reason
Nehru built science as an instrument of the State, housed in elite campuses and government laboratories, and he assumed the temper would seep outward from them into the country. It did not. Most Indians met science as something the State owned and occasionally put on display, at the opening of a dam or the launch of a rocket. Nehru called the great dams the ‘temples of modern India,’ and the metaphor was more exact than he meant it to be. People went to them as they went to temples to witness power, not to examine it.
The State that came after Nehru inherited the temples and none of the theology. Indira Gandhi’s government spent heavily on science and spoke of it constantly. India launched its first satellite, Aryabhata, in 1975, a year after it tested a nuclear device at Pokhran under the codename Smiling Buddha. These were serious achievements. But the epistemic content had drained away. Science had become a source of national prestige and a technique of administration, and neither use requires anybody to doubt anything.
The clearest evidence is constitutional. The duty ‘to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform’ entered the Constitution as Article 51A(h) through the 42nd Amendment of 1976, during the Emergency. It was written in the same year that the State sterilised millions under coercion and justified it in the vocabulary of planning and population science. Scientific temper became a fundamental duty of the citizen at precisely the moment the State demonstrated that its own rationality answered to nobody.
That is the post-Nehru settlement in miniature. The language of science was enshrined and the discipline of science was abandoned. The citizen was instructed to cultivate a spirit of inquiry by a government that had exempted itself from inquiry altogether. By the 1970s, the Planning Commission spoke in inputs, outputs and targets, and expertise had moved out of any public conversation about what kind of society India should be and into a closed room where numbers were settled on the citizen’s behalf.
Once science had fused with administration in this way, every failure of administration became, in the public mind, a failure of the knowledge it claimed to stand on. After 1991, the vocabulary narrowed again, into efficiency and delivery, and secularism shrank with it into an administrative posture with no argument behind it.
In 1981, a group that included PN Haksar, PM Bhargava and Raja Ramanna issued a Statement on Scientific Temper through the Nehru Centre in Bombay, warning that the habit of mind Nehru had prized was in retreat. That the men who ran Indian science felt obliged, 17 years after Nehru’s death, to write a manifesto for his central idea tells you how far the State had already drifted from it. Indian political psychologist Ashis Nandy answered with a counter-Statement on humanistic temper, arguing that scientific temper was itself the creed of a narrow elite and a form of contempt against the knowledge of ordinary Indians.
The scientific temper of the Nehruvian State was the property of a few thousand people, and most of them worked for the government. The cure for an elite science was a public one. Retreating from science did nothing for the people it had excluded except hand them over to whoever next claimed to speak for their traditions.
Technology never secularised anything
The modernisers of the 1950s hoped that machinery would wear ritual down. The opposite happened, and it began almost at once. In May 1951, President Rajendra Prasad attended the consecration of the rebuilt Somnath temple against Nehru’s explicit advice. The reconstruction had been organised with every tool of a modern State such as public fundraising, civil engineering, and a national publicity campaign. Sacred memory used modern means and lost nothing by it.
The Kumbh Mela makes the same point at scale every 12 years. On the floodplain at Prayagraj, the State builds an entire temporary city, with pontoon bridges, power grids, hospitals and police stations, and presents the result as a triumph of engineering. The engineering is impeccable. Drones, satellite mapping, and crowd-flow software have been absorbed into the event without altering its logic in the slightest.
Instruments carry no worldview of their own. A society can adopt every device modern science has produced while rejecting every habit of mind that produced it, and a State that has valued science for its outputs for a better part of a century will see no contradiction at all. It is tempting to treat this as the eccentricities of one government.
They are better read as the logical end of a settlement that began in 1950s. If science is hardware, there is no reason the hardware should not sit beside the idol. If science is prestige, an ancient Indian origin for it only adds to the prestige. Nothing in a rocket objects to being blessed. Only a method objects, and the State had stopped carrying the method decades earlier. The governments did not dismantle Nehru’s rational State. They found the building already empty and moved in.
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Where science could stand
So, what could those of us who care about science actually defend?
Asking the State to be the custodian of reason again is asking it for something it has shown, under governments of every colour, that it will not provide. Calls to restore scientific temper by ministerial exhortation only confirm that science is something the government hands down, which is exactly the mistake that brought us here. The Nehruvian model failed because it trusted the State with knowledge. Repeating that trust under a different government would not succeed in the same way and for the same reason.
What can be defended is science as a public practice of verification, owned by the people who do it and addressed to everyone else. Objectivity is achieved by communities that critique one another and are open to hearing the other side. It has never been the possession of experts standing alone, still less of the ministries that employ them. That is a modest idea with demanding consequences.
It means scientific academies saying in public when a public Statement is wrong, and accepting the cost of saying it. It means scientists showing their evidence and their errors in the languages people actually read, and abandoning the outreach theatre staged around launches and medals. It means treating every public claim, whether it arrives from a podium or a WhatsApp forward, as something that can be verified, and doing the verification where people can see but in a civilised manner.
This will not rebuild the idea of secular India of 1950. That country existed mostly on paper, and the paper has since been written over. Nor will it make the State rational again. The State was never going to be the vehicle. But a scientific community that speaks for itself, independently of whoever holds power, is the one institution left that can insist on evidence before a public that has been taught not to expect it.
Nehru’s oversight was to make science an ornament of the State. The task now is to make it analyse the State. That is a smaller ambition than the one the republic began with, and it is the only one with any chance of lasting.
Pranav Sharma is a historian of science reading for a DPhil in History at the University of Oxford. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)