 "Hamid Ansari")
Invoking Mahatma Gandhi's views on communal harmony, Vice President Hamid Ansari on Thursday told Nigerian students here that India's Constitution comprehensively defined secularism as separation of religion from politics and the state.
Delivering a lecture on 'The Legacy of India's National Movement' at the University of Lagos, he said from its early days, the nationalist movement was committed to secularism.
"Secularism was defined in a comprehensive manner which meant the separation of religion from politics and the state, the treatment of religion as a private matter for the individual, state neutrality towards or equal respect for all religions, absence of discrimination between followers of different religions, and active opposition to communalism," he said.
"Gandhi expressed it succinctly in 1942: 'Religion is a personal matter which should have no place in politics'," he said. Yet the dark forces of communalism were powerful and led to the partition of India in 1947, he rued.
"That traumatic event resulted in a wave of communal carnage. Despite it, the strong secular commitment of the national movement enabled independent India to make secularism a basic pillar of its Constitution, as also of its state and society," he said.
He stressed on the need for youths to have a sense of history and know that the environment that encourages their aspirations was built on the sacrifice and toil of others.
"It was this tradition which is reflected in the Indian Constitution. It belied the view that democracy and civil liberties would not survive in a society so divided by language, religion, caste and culture and in the absence of a minimum of prosperity, economic development and literacy of the developed world".
He said, Gandhi's political strategy inspired many.
"The best known example is in South Africa where Nelson Mandela was inspired by the Gandhian virtues of forgiveness and compassion, values that served him and his country very well on his assumption to power. In West Africa, nationalist leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah in the British colony of the Gold Coast were inspired by Gandhi's success. In Poland, Lech Walesa consciously tried to incorporate elements of Gandhian strategy in the Solidarity Movement," he said.
Noting that the freedom struggle was built around the basic notion that the people had to and could play an active role in politics and in their own liberation, he said it succeeded in politicising and drawing into political action, a large part of the Indian people.
