PUBLISHED
December 21, 2025
KARACHI:
India did not stumble into secularism. It arrived there bruised, traumatised, and acutely aware of the dangers of unchecked majoritarian power. The decision to separate the authority of the state from the dominance of any one religion was not ideological fashion, it was a matter of political survival. A country born amid the carnage of Partition could not afford a state that chose favourites based on faith.
But secularism was never meant to make India less Hindu. It was meant to make power less cruel to its minorities. It was the architecture that held the republic together. That architecture is now cracking, and that distinction is increasingly being erased under the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Narendra Modi.
When Chief Minister Nitish Kumar of the Janata Dal (United)—a party that claims secular credentials but has morphed into an extension of the majority BJP, a far-right political body driven by Hindutva ideology—publicly pulled down a Muslim woman’s hijab during an official event, the moment reverberated far beyond the immediate scene. The act itself was small, a flick of fabric, a casual gesture, but it carried the weight of something much larger. It was not merely discourteous or inappropriate. It was a physical assertion of authority over a woman’s body, enacted without consent and without consequence.
What followed was almost as telling as the act itself. Outrage was immediate, but it was accompanied by a flurry of rationalisations – debates over intent, appeals to context, and accusations that critics were overreacting. Leading the chorus of justifications, Uttar Pradesh minister Sanjay Nishad said: “He is also a human being after all. One should not hound him like this. Just by touching the hijab caused such an uproar—what would have happened if he had touched something else?”
Comments like Nishad’s show how the woman’s discomfort was subordinated to the reputational management of the powerful—in this case, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. In a functioning secular democracy, such a moment would have ended with Kumar’s resignation and his political career. Instead, it faded into the noise, with most responses merely justifying the act. This is how secularism dies, not through a dramatic repeal, but through normalisation.
Secularism as restraint, not hostility
India’s secular architecture was always fragile. Communal riots erupted even in its early decades. Religious prejudice never vanished. Caste hierarchies remained deeply entrenched. Despite these failures, there was a broadly shared understanding that the state was meant to restrain religious dominance, not amplify it. Political leaders were expected, at least publicly, to uphold the principle that citizenship could not be graded by belief. That expectation has steadily eroded since Modi ascended to power.
Today, secularism is often caricatured as hostility to Hinduism, while Hindutva is presented as cultural revival. If anything, this framing is misleading. Secularism, as practised in India’s constitution, was never anti-faith. It was anti-entitlement. It denied the majority the right to treat the state as an extension of its own religious identity. Hindutva reverses this logic.
It recasts the majority not as one community among many, but as the rightful owner of the nation’s moral centre. In doing so, it transforms minorities into guests, tolerated, conditional, perpetually on probation.
This shift has profound consequences. When power sees itself as civilisationally justified, restraint of any sort begins to look unnecessary. The state no longer asks whether it should intervene in matters of belief or personal autonomy. It asks only whether it can.
Manufactured suspicion against Muslims
India’s Muslims have borne the brunt of this transformation under Modi. They are spoken about incessantly, but rarely addressed as full political subjects. Their loyalty and even their citizenship is questioned. Their religious practices are scrutinised for signs of extremism. Their neighbourhoods are policed as potential threats.
This suspicion is not accidental, it is cultivated and manufactured. Over time, Muslims have been framed as demographic dangers, security risks, or beneficiaries of misplaced generosity. Each framing justifies a different form of exclusion. Lynching is rationalised as spontaneous anger. Housing demolitions are described as urban order. Surveillance is defended as national interest. None of these measures, taken alone, announces the death of secularism. Together, they hollow it out.
Muslim women are particularly vulnerable within this ecosystem. They are cast simultaneously as victims needing rescue and as symbols of backwardness requiring discipline. Their choices are endlessly interpreted by those who neither share their experiences nor respect their agency.
The hijab has become the most visible site of this obsession. It is framed as incompatible with modernity, neutrality or equality, even as other religious markers pass without comment. Choice is celebrated in principle and denied in practice. Muslim women are told they must be liberated, even if they do not consent to the method.
In such an environment, a public official pulling a woman’s hijab is not a lapse in judgement. It is an expression of ideological confidence.
When power crosses into touch
Few would deny that speech and physical intrusion occupy entirely different moral and legal realms. Laws can be debated. Policies can be challenged. But when power touches, it bypasses deliberation and asserts dominance directly.
Consent is the quiet cornerstone of any functional democracy. It rests on the assumption that no citizen’s body or belief is available for correction by authority. When consent is overridden, hierarchy takes its place.
What matters here is not intent but structure. Pulling a Muslim woman’s hijab is not leadership, it is an act of bigotry and misogyny exercised through power. It reflects a political culture in which authority feels entitled to intervene, to correct, to touch — without asking. But judging by their playbook, it is obvious that Hindutva politics does not operate on consent, it operates on control. And where control replaces consent, hierarchy is no longer hidden.
The defences offered in the aftermath only reinforce this reality. Those in power are granted the luxury of interpretation, those subjected to power are asked to absorb the violation. Harm becomes subjective. Accountability is often absent in such cases, and even more so for minorities.
Gender, hierarchy and the limits of belonging
It would be a mistake to see this incident purely through the lens of Islamophobia. The same political logic that renders Muslim women’s bodies available for discipline has long governed the lives of Dalit women.
Dalit women occupy one of the most precarious positions in Indian society. Their exclusion from temples, their vulnerability to violence, and their punishment for asserting dignity are not anomalies, they are mechanisms through which caste is enforced. Appeals to tradition, purity and order are routinely used to justify their marginalisation and exclusion.
Hindutva claims to dissolve caste distinctions under a unified Hindu identity, but it rarely confronts the inequalities where they run deepest—in who can enter sacred spaces, who controls women’s lives, and who holds power. Dominant-caste authority remains largely intact. Dalit assertion is tolerated only so long as it does not threaten these hierarchies.
Women’s bodies become the terrain on which this hierarchy is enforced. Whether through policing what they wear, denying them entry, or threatening them with violence, control is exercised in ways that shape daily life, restrict freedom, and demand obedience.
For those who live under it, the effects are personal and persistent. Fear, frustration, and the constant reminder of where they stand in a rigid social order. These patterns make it clear that misogyny within Hindutva politics is not selective, it is very much structural.
The myth of the exception
When confronted with such incidents, defenders often reach for the language of exception. This was an aberration, they argue, not a reflection of the system. Few would disagree that a system is revealed not by its ideals, but by how it responds to violations.
The absence of swift, unequivocal accountability is itself a form of endorsement. It signals what will be tolerated. Over time, tolerance becomes an expectation.
India has not lost its secular character in a single decisive moment. It has been eroded through accumulation. Every incident seems to lower the threshold of outrage; each justification widens the space for the next intrusion. Democracy in India has not disappeared—it has been steadily thinning over time.
What is being lost
The debate over Hindutva is often framed as a culture war between faith and liberalism, tradition and modernity. This framing conceals the deeper issue.
The real question is whether India can remain a republic in which citizenship is equal, autonomy is respected, and power is constrained. A state that privileges one identity over others cannot indefinitely claim to represent all.
Secularism was never a guarantee of harmony. It was a promise of restraint. It asked the powerful to accept limits, and the majority to live with difference. It recognised that pluralism is not comfortable, but it is necessary.
When leaders feel entitled to rearrange a woman’s clothing in public, that restraint has already collapsed. When such acts are minimised rather than condemned, the collapse becomes irreversible.
And what starts with minorities never ends with them. A culture that discards consent will spare no one. Today, Muslim women, tomorrow dissenters, journalists, students—anyone who refuses to conform.
