Indian tolerance has deep roots. The Vedas, a body of texts believed to be around 3,000 years old, proclaim that “truth is one; the wise call it by many names.” The Rig Veda, considered the oldest, similarly teaches that “good thoughts come to us from all sides.”

Indian tolerance has also manifested in the country’s society and polity. The Edicts of Emperor Asoka, who ruled much of north and central India in the third century B.C., are notable for their accommodation of other faiths — proclaiming, for instance, that “all religions should reside everywhere” and that “there should be growth in the essentials of all religions.”

India is also one of the few countries without a history of anti-Semitism, despite the presence of a Jewish community that dates back almost 2,000 years.

Indian tolerance is evident in more recent moral and political thought, too. Mahatma Gandhi, himself a committed Hindu, expressed admiration for Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount and was a strong proponent of Hindu-Muslim comity. Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister, was an ardent secularist who rejected the idea that India should follow in Pakistan’s footsteps and create a religious state.

For all its troubles, Nehruvian secularism is still the guiding principle of Indian political life. Its concept of equidistance among faiths, of state indifference rather than hostility to religion, is more benign (and tolerant) than European-style secularism, which positions itself aggressively against religion.

India has its intolerant sides, of course. The country has struggled in recent decades with a Hindu nationalist movement whose more extremist elements have promoted violence against foreigners and minorities. And, for all their acceptance of outsiders, Indians are capable of displaying remarkable prejudice against different castes and classes within the country. Indeed, it’s probably fair to say that Indian tolerance is most evident toward — if not quite limited to — foreign immigrants and tourists.

But today, as the Indian economy surges, as its companies benefit from and become emblems of 21st-century globalization, I can’t help feeling that the nation’s openness, its ability to communicate and work with other cultures, are at the root of much of its success.