was the legitimate leader of the muslim community
Period gave India a multicultural society.
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Answer:
At home and abroad, one of postindependence India’s defining characteristics is that the nation has managed to sustain democratic governance in the face of striking ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity. In the early years after independence, the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the ruling Indian National Congress (or Congress Party) advocated for an Indian brand of secularism designed to hold the country’s disparate communities together under one roof. Indeed, Nehru often pronounced that India’s composite culture was one of its greatest strengths. The Hindu nationalists who later came to populate the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its various ideological affiliates have consistently harbored a starkly different view; they envision India as a majoritarian nation-state, not a multicultural one. The tensions inherent in these competing visions of Indian nationhood have come to the fore in recent years, especially since the BJP’s landmark electoral victory in 2014.
To understand these dynamics, it is necessary to define basic concepts and review relevant history. This is because political entrepreneurs who promote ethnoreligious identities—especially Hindu nationalist ideologues—have created much confusion around the notion of secularism, claiming that its proponents have endeavored to make the state hostile or indifferent to religion. That was certainly not the intention of the architects of modern India, whose enemy was not religion, but communalism.
Christophe Jaffrelot
Jaffrelot’s core research focuses on theories of nationalism and democracy, mobilization of the lower castes and Dalits (ex-untouchables) in India, the Hindu nationalist movement, and ethnic conflicts in Pakistan.
@JAFFRELOTC
Nationalist forces aside, all is not well with Indian secularism. Even before Hindutva forces began attacking India’s secular tradition, the Congress Party had already started undermining secularism by cynically jockeying for the support of different voting blocs and by stoking divisive issues of social identity (a practice known as vote banking). In parallel, the judiciary—especially at the lower levels—has adopted a majoritarian undertone on certain controversial cases. Whether secularism can maintain its hold as a defining ideology for the country will depend in part on a combination of political forces—namely the BJP’s future electoral success and the strategies the opposition adopts to counter the ruling party.