The Secular Inquisition

You think your secularism is the thin line between civilization and chaos, between modernity and medieval darkness. You've been taught that without this precious imported ideology, India would spontaneously combust into communal violence, that 1.4 billion people would tear each other apart over gods and temples and mosques.

Except—you are wrong and your wrongness isn't accidental. It's engineered. It's the result of seventy years of the most successful psychological colonization in human history.

Indian secularism is colonialism. Not colonialism in disguise or colonialism-lite but colonialism in its purest, most aggressive, intolerant form—except this time, the colonizers are Indians with foreign mindsets.

The British left. The flags changed. The anthems changed. But the intellectual occupation never ended. It just changed managers. The contempt for everything Indian, everything dharmic, everything that doesn't fit into neat Western categories—that stayed. It put on a suit, learned to speak English without an accent, got a PhD from Oxford or Cambridge, and came back home to finish the job the missionaries started.

And if you're feeling defensive right now, if your fingers are itching to type "Hindutva fascist" in the comments—congratulations, you're proving my point.

How does this psychological occupation work? It's genuinely brilliant in its cruelty.

First, you take a civilization that had functioned for millennia without a concept of "religion" as the West understands it—no holy wars, no inquisitions, no single book claiming exclusive access to divine truth. A civilization that had developed its own sophisticated mechanisms for managing plurality.

Then you describe this civilization through a Western lens, using Western categories, imposing Western frameworks. You call their spiritual traditions "religion"—even though Dharma encompasses law, ethics, duty, cosmic order, and spiritual practice in ways that "religion" never could.

You reduce their complex social structures to "caste"—a Portuguese word, by the way. You frame their philosophical sophistication as "superstition" and their metaphysics as "escapism".

Third step: You convince the native elite—through your educational system, universities, your approval and disapproval—that these Western descriptions are scientific, objective and neutral. That only primitive people would question these frameworks.

Fourth: You make your imported solution—secularism—the only conceivable answer to problems you yourself defined using your own categories. Without secularism, you say, this "religious" society will tear itself apart. Never mind that it didn't for thousands of years before you showed up.

Final step: You make any deviation from this orthodoxy not just wrong, but evil. Fascist. Communal. Fundamentalist. You deploy these words like the missionaries deployed "heathen" and "idolater" and "polytheist"—as conversation-enders. As weapons.

And just like that, secularism becomes the new religion.

The Western-educated Indian intellectual today actively dislikes his own country. Does not study its cultural traditions and does not honor them. He is often actively working to replace them with what he considers more "progressive" models from the West.

This person was born in India, lives in India, may even love India in some abstract way. But intellectually? Spiritually? He is following mindsets that represent Western political and psychological theories that have no comparable concept of Dharma, that recognize no higher consciousness behind the material world. This worldview has been India's predominant lens for centuries.

Think about the sheer audacity of this achievement. The British managed to create a class of people who would continue the colonial project after the colonizers left—not because they were bribed or coerced, but because they genuinely believed they were being progressive.

I used to be this person. The one who reflexively dismissed anything "Hindu" as regressive. Who used "secular" as a synonym for "civilized." Who thought criticizing Indian traditions made me sophisticated, while criticizing Western frameworks made me unsophisticated.

The moment everything changed was when I actually read what these "regressive" Hindu philosophers were saying—not through Western translations that stripped context and imposed Christian theological frameworks, but in their own terms.

And I found philosophical sophistication that made most Western philosophy look like children playing with blocks. Concepts of consciousness that neuroscience is only now beginning to approach. Ethical frameworks that didn't require belief in a sky-daddy or threats of eternal hellfire. Mathematics, astronomy, linguistics, medicine—achievements that the West either appropriated without credit or dismissed as myth.

I realized that I had been trained—literally trained, like a dog—to view all of this through contempt. That my education had been designed not to illuminate but to alienate and that my sophistication was really internalized colonialism wearing a graduate degree.

I realized Hindu thought is intentionally dumbed down into Western terms to make it appear inferior. Advaita Vedanta—one of the most sophisticated non-dual philosophies ever—gets reduced to "Eastern mysticism." Yoga becomes a workout routine. Karma becomes a cosmic vending machine. Dharma doesn't even get translated properly.

And the people doing this dumbing-down are Indians. Indians who've been so thoroughly colonized that they do the colonizer's work with more enthusiasm than the colonizers ever did.

Secularism in India functions exactly like a fundamentalist religion. It has:

• its priests (the "secular intellectuals")
• its heretics (anyone who questions the framework)
• its inquisitions (media trials, academic blacklisting, social ostracism)
• and its excommunications (being labeled "communal" or "fascist").

At any gathering of educated Indians, try saying "I think secularism as practiced in India has problems" and watch what happens. You won't get intellectual engagement or curious questions. You'll get moral panic. Accusations. The same look Christians give apostates.

Because secularism isn't a political framework in India—it's a political religion and like all fundamentalist religions, it's deeply intolerant of competing worldviews. That something is "against secularism" became a way to condemn anything Hindu as effectively as missionaries and mullahs had used terms like polytheist, idolater, heathen, kafir.

Secularism brought about a cultural revolution in India. Not as dramatic as China's Cultural Revolution but in many ways more effective because it was more subtle.

The Chinese Cultural Revolution was violent, visible and short-lived. India's secular cultural revolution was invisible and ongoing. The result is a country where intellectuals are ashamed of their own intellectual tradition. Where speaking Sanskrit is seen as regressive but speaking English is seen as progressive.

India was a civilization that was much more enlightened, expansive and prosperous than people realize. The Dharmic framework didn't demand secularism because it didn't need secularism. It had something better—a worldview that could accommodate multiple paths, practices and philosophies without requiring them to be homogenized. Unity without uniformity.

But you can't colonize a civilization that's comfortable with itself. You need to make it uncomfortable first. Convince it that its traditions are the problem and that its diversity is a weakness. That only Western frameworks can save it from itself.

And once you've convinced a people that their own culture is the enemy? They'll destroy it themselves. They'll call it progress.

The secular fundamentalists present you with a false choice: embrace secularism (their version) or embrace religious fascism. Either be "enlightened" or be a bigot. The university or the temple.

It's the same trick missionaries used: either accept Christianity or remain in darkness. Either our god or your damnation. The words changed but the structure remained identical.

What if there are frameworks that don't require adopting Western political categories? What if Dharma isn't just Hindu nationalism in disguise but an actually sophisticated alternative to both theocracy and secularism?

But you're not allowed to ask these questions. Asking makes you suspect. Answering makes you dangerous.

So where does this leave us? Seventy plus years into this experiment in ideological colonization, India faces a choice. A choice between continuing to think in borrowed categories or developing intellectual frameworks rooted in our own civilizational experience.

This doesn't mean blind traditionalism or rejecting everything external. It means being intellectually honest enough to recognize colonization even when it comes wrapped in progressive language and having the courage to question the frameworks we've been taught are unquestionable.

Because if your entire worldview requires you to have contempt for your own civilization's intellectual achievements and being "sophisticated" requires you to dismiss thousands of years of philosophical development as superstition—you're not enlightened. You're colonized. And the first step to decolonization is recognizing the colonization.

If you're a "progressive secular Indian" You'll probably dismiss everything I just wrote as "Hindutva propaganda" or "anti-secular rhetoric". You'll reach for those conversation-enders, those thought-terminators. Because that's what seventy plus years of conditioning does. It makes questioning the framework feel like moral failure.

But maybe that reflexive defensiveness is evidence, not refutation. Maybe the fact that you can't question secularism without being labeled a fascist is itself proof that secularism functions as fundamentalism.

Think about it. Or don't. Either way, the intellectual occupation continues. The only question is whether you're going to recognize it.