S Jaishankar was asked if India was becoming a "Hindu majoritarian" country. Here's what he said...
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00:00For us, secularism doesn't mean being non-religious.
00:03What happened in reality, in politics, we actually got into a sort of a vote-bank politics,
00:12a minoritarian pandemic.
00:30Has India changed from the Nehruvian era?
00:46Absolutely.
00:47Because one of the assumptions of that era, one of the, you know, a thought which very
00:58much guided the thinking of the polity and its projection abroad, was what we in India,
01:07you know, the way we define secularism in India, and for us secularism doesn't mean
01:13being non-religious.
01:14For us, secularism means equal respect to all faiths.
01:21Now, what happened in reality, in politics, was beginning with equal respect for all faiths.
01:29We actually got into a sort of a vote-bank politics, a minoritarian pandemic.
01:37And that, over a period of time, I think, created a backlash.
01:46So, a very powerful word in the Indian political debate is what is called appeasement, which is...
01:54We've got some track record on that too.
01:57I'm speaking here only for myself.
02:01So, the direction in which politics went, I think more and more people started feeling
02:09that, in a way, in the name of being equal, of equality of all religions, in fact, the
02:16biggest religion had to be self-deprecatory and play itself down.
02:22And again, you know, a big part, I think, of that community felt it was not being fair.
02:30So, the changes we have seen, the political changes and the social changes we have seen
02:37in the last years have been partly at an intellectual level a reaction and a political level a reaction.
02:46Do you think tolerance has gone down?
02:48No, I don't think so.
02:49I think, on the contrary, I think people today are less hypocritical about their beliefs,
02:58about their traditions, about their culture.
03:01I would say today, I think you used the word, you said Martin Wolf said, we are less liberal.
03:10And more efficient.
03:11Yeah, that I take as a given.
03:14But I would say we are more Indian.
03:17We are more authentic.
03:19We are not today either currying favour before a global audience or really trying to live
03:29up to some kind of left-wing liberal construct which a lot of Indians felt was not us.