Tomichan Matheikal's blog

On 2 Oct 2025, when the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh [RSS] celebrates the centenary of its foundation, India may cease to be a “secular and socialist” nation. All steps are being taken to remove those two words from the Preamble of the country’s Constitution, though the apex court had rejected a petition for the same on 25 Nov 2024. Though those two words were added to the Preamble by Indira Gandhi during the Emergency, the ideals have only done good to the country, the Supreme Court observed. Ironically, the very next day of the SC’s verdict, the President of India spoke on the occasion of the 75 th anniversary of the Constitution and refused to mention those two words: secular and socialist . The President, the Prime Minister, all ministers except George Kurien in the PM’s cabinet are all Hindus. (There are two Sikhs and Buddhists each, but they are Hindus, according to the Sangh). Many of them share the opinion of the General Secretary of the RSS, Dattatreya Hosabale, that Mus...

Book Discussion The Indian National Congress Party is repeatedly accused of Muslim appeasement by Narendra Modi and his followers. Did the Congress appease Muslims more than it did the Hindus? Neeti Nair deals with that question in the second chapter of her book, Hurt Sentiments , which I introduced in my previous post: The Triumph of Godse . The first instance of a book being banned in India occurred as an effort to placate a religious community. That was in 1955. It was done by none other than the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. The book was Aubrey Menen’s retelling of The Ramayana . Menen’s writing has a fair share of satire and provocative incisiveness. Nehru banned the sale of the book in India (it was published in England) in order to assuage the wounded Hindu sentiments. The book “outrages the religious feelings of the Hindus,” Nehru’s government declared. That was long before the Indira Gandhi’s Congress government banned Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses ...

‘Secular’ and ‘communal’ are bad words in India unlike in any other part of the world.  Most countries in the world are secular in the sense they don’t have state religions; they keep politics and religion apart from each other.  ‘Communal’ means belonging or related to a community and has no negative connotations except in India.  Source We Indians are queer indeed.  We elected a party to power in the Centre because it promised to deliver us development .  But from the time the party started governing us, we started entertaining ourselves by abusing some people as ‘secular’ or ‘pseudo-secular.’  The latter term seems to have gone out of fashion. The country is polarised today into the ‘secular’ and the ‘communal.’  If you believe in some religion or god, you are communal.  If you demand peace and prosperity, you are filthy secular.  Rajnath Singh, our Home Minister, wants to cleanse the Indian vocabulary of secularism....

A few weeks back the RSS mouthpiece in Malayalam, Kesari , published an article, by a man who contested the last elections on a BJP ticket, in which the writer argued that Nehru should have been the more appropriate target of Nathuram Godse’s bullets than Gandhi.  The article went on to heap as much ignominy on Nehru as possible. The Sangh Parivar could never accept people like Gandhi and Nehru whose vision was extremely inclusive.  The Parivar’s own vision was not only exclusive but also filled with hatred for people professing religions other than Hinduism.  BJP ad on the Maulana's birth anniversary Mr Narendra Modi is shrewd enough to realise the danger that underlies such a constricted vision.   Gandhi and Nehru were (and they still are) highly admired far beyond the borders of Hindutva.  Modi as Prime Minister cannot afford to denigrate such figures in other countries at least.  Hence he changed the strategy: he decided to incorpor...

A K Antony Mr A K Antony’s recent remark that the appeasement of minority communities by the Congress party has led to its disgraceful defeat in the last general elections may generate some debate in the country.  However, it is not only the Congress but also many other political parties in the country that should take an introspective look at themselves vis-à-vis their attitude towards religions.   One of the greatest tragedies in independent India has been the misuse of religion by its politicians.  The catastrophic misuse started even before Independence and the British imperial government’s divide-and-rule policy added the necessary fuel to the fire.  The vision embodied in the Constitution of India with respect to religion is very noble indeed.  It respects every religion and allows the citizens to follow the religion of their choice or not follow any.  What happened from the time of Indira Gandhi onward has been disastrous for the coun...

Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, died 50 years ago (27 May 1964).  Tomorrow the country will get to know a new Prime Minister, most probably.  How far will we have come from Nehru then? Nelson Mandela, while admitting Mahatma Gandhi’s influence on him, said, “But Nehru was really my hero.”  Nehru was a true democrat, explained Mandela in his Rajiv Gandhi Foundation lecture on 25 Jan 1995, who strove to ensure a life with dignity for every citizen.  Nehru transcended the narrow boundaries like religion that tended to divide man against man.  Arguably, Nehru’s greatest contribution to India was his concept of secularism.  Today the word causes frowns on the foreheads of the country’s culture guardians.  The Congress that ruled over India after Nehru is to be blamed partially for those frowns.  But the lion’s share of the blame should go to the vested interests of certain other political parties and religious organis...