S Jaishankar, External Affairs Minister of India.
The enemies are surprised and troubled by India’s ever increasing power in the world. Therefore, there is a conspiracy going on abroad to create religious controversy in India. The enemies are conspiring to attack India’s secularism through foreign journalists. But every time they have met with failure. Once again, India’s secularism was questioned during Foreign Minister S Jaishankar’s visit to Britain. But the Foreign Minister gave such a concrete answer that everyone stopped talking.
S Jaishankar believes that for India, secularism does not mean being non-religious, but respecting all religions equally, but the government policies of ‘appeasement’ adopted in the past made the people of the country’s largest religion feel that As if in the name of equality they had to condemn themselves. Jaishankar said this during a discussion on ‘A billion people’s view of the world’ organized at the Royal Over-Seas League in London on Wednesday evening.
This question was asked to Jaishankar
Jaishankar was asked whether India has become less liberal and more of a ‘majoritarian Hindu’ nation under the rule of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government since the Nehru era. In response to this question, Jaishankar said that India has definitely changed and this change does not mean that India has become less liberal, but the people of the country now express their beliefs in a more authentic manner. Jaishankar said in response to a question by journalist and author Lionel Barber, “Has India changed since the Nehruvian era?” Absolutely, because one of the concepts of that era that largely guided the country’s policies and their implementation abroad was the way we defined secularism in India.
Told the world the meaning of secularism
The External Affairs Minister said, “For us, secularism does not mean being non-religious, for us secularism means equal respect for all religions. Now, what actually happened in politics started with equal respect for all religions but we have in a way got involved in the politics of promoting minorities. I think there is a resistance to this with time. Jaishankar mentioned ‘appeasement’ as a very powerful word in the debate about Indian politics, which gave a different direction to the country’s politics. “More and more people in the country started to realize that in a way, in the name of equality of all religions, in reality, people from the majority community have to self-deprecate and degrade themselves,” he said. A large part of that community felt that this was not fair.
feeling of Indianness more than ever
Jaishankar said that the political and social changes seen in India in the last few years are partly a response to this feeling of inequality at the intellectual and political level. In response to a question about the alleged decline in tolerance in India, Jaishankar said, “I don’t think so, I think the opposite.” I think today people are less hypocritical about their beliefs, their traditions and their culture. In today’s times, there is more feeling of Indianness and authenticity among the people of the country.
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