What Role Does Religion Play In Religion

Religion is one of the fundamental pillars that India as a nation has been built upon. It has been the reason this nation has been united, and the reason it has been divided. Therefore, while addressing the issue of religion in India, one must fully comprehend the impact that religious concepts have had on shaping this country into what it is today. The religious scenario of our nation is what we are trying to understand and address in this essay.

India is a secular nation, which means that religion should not play a major role in the way the country is run. It is ideally deemed to be a private matter for people to practice as they will. However, considering the power that religion has to unite people and the hold it has over the way people

Religious plurality refers to the acceptance of the existence of varying ideologies and the energetic engagement of the state with this diversity. It goes beyond the bounds of simple tolerance but seeks the proper understanding of different views. On the other hand, secularism involves the strict separation of the state from religious beliefs and the treatment of people belonging to different religions as equal before the law. One incorporates the integration of the multiplicity in society while the other calls for the removal of the concept itself, thereby discounting the differences that come under it. India has had a long history of being religiously, culturally and linguistically diverse and many say this plurality breeds pluralism in society i.e. that tolerance and acceptance of the multitude of differences stems from the existence of such differences

The overt association between the BJP and the RSS – which is viewed to be BJP’s access to its largest vote bank, orthodox Hindus – does nothing to allay these fears.

The most alarming factor, more than the existence of extremist right-wing, and anti-state groups, is the fact that they have a significant number of sympathisers, usually from people who are threatened by attacks from the opposite group. When an RSS leader spoke of making Muslims and Christians infertile in order to curb their population, and consequently making them extinct from India altogether, it was received surprisingly positively by other Hindu groups across the nation.

In both contrast and response to right-wing extremism in India, there exists religious terrorism that focuses on attacking the perceived character of India as a Hindu state. Ten of the major terror attacks seen in India over the last decade were connected to Islamic radicals in the country, usually associated with terror groups based outside the country. These included the train bombings in Mumbai and the 26/11 attacks on the city. Terrorist groups like LeT and the Indian Mujahideen are known to be figureheads of the anti-Hindu terror movement in