There is discordance in Justice Hemant Gupta’s analysis of the nature of Indian secularism and his decision to uphold the exclusionary rules against the veil. That India, by its constitutional nature, is a secular state is uncontestable. The original Constitution adopted in 1950 did not explicitly use the word “secular”. But from the debates in the Constituent Assembly in the 1940s, it is evident that the Indian Republic was conceptualised and formed as a secular republic. This secular nature of the state has been affirmed time and again by the Indian judiciary, which has included this characteristic in the elements that constitute the basic structure of the Constitution. This means Parliament, even with a super majority, cannot do away with it. Where this idea of secularism was often contested in the Indian context was the political realm. Increasingly, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has sought to redefine this aspect of the republic by moving it closer to a Hindu majoritarian worldview. But in the legal realm, there was, to a large extent, unanimity on the secular credentials of the Constitution. This remains the case even today. But last week, the needle seems to have moved ever so slightly on the articulation of the nature of this Indian secularism. This has serious repercussions for the concepts of equality and plurality, especially at a time when majoritarian politics is on the upswing. On October 12, the Supreme Court of India delivered a split verdict on a controversial case from Karnataka where Muslim school students were denied the right to wear the hijab in classrooms. Justice Hemant Gupta, who retired from office last week, upheld the executive orders of the state government that enabled the exclusion of the hijab from classrooms. Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia, the other judge on the bench, struck it down. The chief justice will now decide how this case will proceed since no finality has been reached. There is discordance in Justice Gupta’s opinion between his analysis of the nature of Indian secularism and his eventual decision to uphold the exclusionary rules against hijab. The nature of Indian secularism An important element that anchors Justice Gupta’s opinion in the split judgment is the special nature of Indian secularism, compared to the model in the West. The Indian Constitution was indeed influenced by the American and European models. But the Constitution was not an unmediated legal transplant from the West. The Constituent Assembly spent considerable energy on adapting ideas to serve the purposes of the Indian context. The Partition experience led to two competing models in the subcontinent. In Pakistan, the preference was for an Islamic state. In India, sectarian considerations were overcome to create a secular rather than Hindu state. Not only did the founders choose secularism, this secularism was also seen as an enabling feature for the expression of diverse religious identities. It deviates from the Western model in the sense that the effacing of religious expression in the secular sphere was to be resisted. Instead, the Indian model, as it is also understood by the judiciary, is the equal treatment of religious communities. Under the Indian Constitution, the state cannot prefer one religion over the other. At the individual level, this means those practising a religion have an equal right to express their religious beliefs just like people of other religions do. The state has a role in regulating this expression for considerations such as public order, morality, health and attempts at social reform. It is also limited by the other fundamental rights. In other words, the state cannot simply ask for the suspension of religious expression outside the limitations, claiming a neutrality of a kind that is a complete severance from the idea of religion, something that is possible in the West in so-called secular spaces. Equality here means equal right to religious expression. It does not mean forcing equal non-expression.