What's in a name? India's tryst with secularism

It has always been the claim of India's politicians that their country is a ‘secular’ state. However, although the Preamble to the Constitution of 1950 proclaims India to be ‘democratic’, it makes no mention of secularism. Fobbed off at the time as of no consequence, this omission was quite deliberate and reflected an awareness on the part of the designers of the constitution, notably Nehru and Ambedkar, that its provisions under ‘freedom of religion’ did not amount to what they understood to be ‘real’ secularism, namely the kind of polity famously embodied in the 1791 First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.