Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, is often described as the Emperor of Hindu Hearts. In a country, which while 80 per cent Hindu, has a Constitution that strictly separates Church from State, such categorization sends Modi’s liberal opponents into a frenzy.

India aspires to be like the West. Its Constitution was derived after years-long study of different western Constitutions by a Constituent Assembly of eminent persons. The head of the Constituent Assembly was BR Ambedkar, a Dalit, an untouchable.

Nowhere is the separation of Church from State prized more than in avowedly-secular France. But the billions that poured out of French pockets to restore the just-burned Notre Dame proved one thing: the soul of France had been signed. And that soul of France is very Christian.

The projects of Paris that house the desperately and dismally poor immigrants of France, too, need restoration, but no French billionaire seems to bother about them.

In the UK, with whom India has colonial ties, the Queen of England is the head of state. She is also the head of the Church of England. Theoretically, at least then, there is little separation between Church and State.

In the US, the world’s oldest and therefore supposedly most mature democracy, no candidate for the presidency can run on an anti-Christian platform. George W. Bush was a born-again Christian. Bill Clinton may not have been as faithful, but attend church services he did as president.

The fervently-Christian Barack Obama was often dogged, even pilloried, for being Muslim as he was born to a Muslim father and had Hussein as his middle name. And what to say of Trump? He may not be such a believer, but he cloaks himself in a Christian pretense. Many of his most rabid supporters are do-or-die Christians.

In short, while many of the major nations of the West preach the concept of separation of Church from State, and proudly so, they seldom practice it.

India is 80 per cent Hindu. The father of modern India, Mahatma Gandhi, was a deeply-religious Hindu even though he was ecumenical in his approach to religion. Gandhi gave his life protecting the lives and the rights of India’s Muslim minority. But he also freely used religion to practice his politics, a trait that turned Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founder and a secular man, into an inveterate foe of Gandhi.

Gandhi’s foremost disciple, Jawaharlal Nehru, ruled newly-Independent India for close to two decades. Educated at Harrow in England from an early age, and then finishing his education from Trinity College, Cambridge, there was little that remained religious about him, even though he was born a Hindu Brahmin. It is a wonder how the devout Gandhi got along with the atheist Nehru.

Nehru was loved by Indian minority and majority alike. There was not a sectarian bone in his body. Nehru maintained that communalism of the majority is far more dangerous that communalism of the minority, a stance that is often castigated by India’s Hindu right-wing to portray him as a minority lover.

His daughter, Indira, ruled India for another 15 years. Not to be outdone by her father, she enshrined the word secular into the preamble of the Indian Constitution through a constitutional amendment in 1976. But unlike her father, she was a practising Hindu, even if somewhat closet, and stated that while the majority needed to ensure the rights of the minority, the minority should not do things to needle the majority. Her secularism therefore was somewhat of a mask.

Not for nothing does the Hindu right not find much wrong with Indira. After Indira, India trundled along from one short-lived Hindu prime minister to another short-lived Hindu prime minister until a Sikh, Manmohan Singh, was installed as PM by the country’s then-supreme leader, Sonia Gandhi, a Catholic hailing from Italy. India’s then-president, Abdul Kalam, was a Muslim. While the president is often a figurehead in India, the three most preeminent leaders of India had all become minorities.

This was hailed by many, including some in the West, as a triumph of Indian secularism. But many Hindus in India chafed at this arrangement. From the west of India rose a man, Narendra Modi, who was determined to put an end to this structure. He swept the federal elections of 2014 and became PM.

The 2002 riots firmly embedded Modi in the hearts of the Hindu right, even as they made him an anathema for Hindu liberals. But the moderate Hindu, previously close to the opposition Congress party, moved toward him and has stayed fixated there. Modi’s first term as PM has been nothing if spectacular. But he takes his Hindu faith seriously, and refuses to “appease” minorities. Such a stance has endeared him to many a Hindu.

So, now, Modi is set to rule India for another five years. India has finally let go of its secularism. The soul of the Hindu, who considers himself oppressed for nearly a millennium, first under Islamic rule and then under the British, has finally been let free. He breathes freer now, but do India’s minorities. And India is finally aping the West in effacing the distinction between Church and State.