BENGALURU, Aug 6: Underscoring the political parties to accept pluralism as an essence of their agenda, Vice President Hamid Ansari today said this was the way forward for the country drive its interest under the Constitution.
Delivering his Address at the 25th Convocation of National School of Law University of India here, he said programmes or principles evolved by the political parties based on religion amount to recognising religion as a part of the political governance which Constitution ‘expressly prohibits’.
He opined that such thinking violated the basic feature of the Constitution. ”Positive secularism negates such a polity and any action in furtherance thereto would be violative of the Constitution”.
Mr Ansari said secularism had both positive and negative contents. The Constitution had struck a balance between temporal parts confining it to the professing a particular religious faith or belief and allows an Indian to practice his religion subject to (the) public order, morality and health.
”The state is prohibited to patronise any particular religion as state religion and is conjoined to observe neutrality.
The State strikes a balance to ensure an atmosphere of full faith and confidence among its people to realise full growth of personality and to make him a rational being on secular lines, to improve individual excellence, regional growth, progress and national integrity,” he said.
The outgoing Vice President stressed on religious tolerance and fraternity that will remain the basic features and postulates of the constitution as a scheme of national integration ‘sectional and religious unity’.
He said the Constitution had highlighted plurality practiced by all sections or people and the administration in a secular state structure.
Pluralism as a moral value seeks to transpose plurality to the level of politics, and suggest arrangements with a single political order in which all constituted groups and all individuals are actors on an equal footing, reflected in the uniformity of the legal capacity, he said.
The Vice President said pluralism in this modern sense presupposes citizenship, saying that citizenship was not a ‘fragile Construct’, but was a complex and increasingly fraught ‘national-civic-plural-ethnic combinations.’ (UNI)
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