Contending that secularism is irrelevant in India, the RSS Saturday said saffron should have been the only colour on the national flag as other colours represented a communal thought. At a seminar on secularism for columnists held in Chennai, RSS’s All India Prachar Pramukh Manmohan Vaidya said “secularism evolved along the themes of separation of the Church and State in Europe and since India doesn’t have a history of theocratic states, the concept of secularism is irrelevant in the Indian context”.

Pointing at the constitutional debate, Vaidya said B R Ambedkar was against inclusion of the word secular in the preamble of the Constitution as he felt India was naturally a secular society.

The seminar, organised by RSS, was attended by more than 80 columnists from south India.

“The perversion of the concept of secularism in India has resulted in the terming of nationalists as communal and people with communal thinking being hailed as secular,” Vaidya said. He added that “the Bharatiya tradition has from time immemorial regarded all faiths and sects as one and that the artificial injection of secularism is not needed in a society as hospitable and assimilative as Hindu society”.

He also spoke of the evolution of Indian Flag and contended that several members of the flag committee (constituted by Congress Working Committee in 1931) felt that representing different religions as colours of the national flag was a communal thought. The committee agreed that the saffron flag with a blue charka would be the best representation of the Indian ethos, Vaidya said. Other speakers at the seminar were BJP vice-president Balbir Punj and RSS mouthpiece Organiser’s editor Prafulla Ketkar.

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