India’s secularism is ascribed in part to Gandhi, and it is certainly true that Gandhi wanted the Indian state to be the homeland for Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians alike. But Mark Tully has pointed out that, far from wanting a state in which religion is stripped from public life – most peoples’ concept of secularism – Gandhi’s hope was for a state in which truly religious values permeate all aspects of life, including the political sphere.

Gandhi’s concept of religion was a pluralistic one:

“I believe in the fundamental Truth of all great religions of the world. I believe they are all God-given and I believe they were necessary for the people to whom these religions were revealed. And I believe that if only we could all of us read the scriptures of the different faiths from the standpoint of the followers of these faiths, we should find that they were at the bottom all one and were all helpful to one another.”

Gandhi’s vision of the secular state is a place where religious values and discourse are cherished and respected in all spheres of life, the public as well as the private, but in which no single religion is allowed to dominate the others. This latter clause prevented Gandhi from supporting the Hindu nationalist (Hindutva) movement which is now so prominent on the Indian political scene. Gandhi’s religious discourse was accepted by his audience, and was effective in motivating them politically because they were, by-and-large, religious people. The deployment of religious language in modern British political life would be doomed to failure, because it would alienate the atheists, it wouldn’t satisfy the fundamentalists, and it would fail to motivate the masses.

Gandhi was a highly intellectual eclecticism, complex and broad-minded. Today when in India narrow-minded opponents of secularism, utterly lacking in compassion and so fond of the good things of life in a vulgar material sense, trivialize him by representing him through the symbol of a pair of spectacles, they mock a great man for whose broadmindedness they have absolutely no respect.