A wise person on the social media site, Twitter, said recently that India is a sovereign, socialist, peculiar, democratic republic. He was obviously punning on the word secular by replacing it with peculiar, but he had made an important point.

The word secular has been interpreted in different ways by various successive governments, so much so that for many, it has become a four-letter word. And successive governments have treated religion and the accompanying or resulting peculiarities of that to their advantage.