Sixty-three years after independence, the issue of national identity is still not settled in India. After the trauma of Partition, religious conflagrations such as the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992 and the Gujarat riots of 2002 have left deep scars on the psyche of the nation. They have led to a fundamental debate over what kind of a nation India should be. Must it uphold a particular culture? Or must it celebrate diversity? In this brilliant essay, Gautam Adhikari, a libera...l-secular democrat who also happens be an agnostic, tackles the issue of national identity head-on. He demonstrates how extremist religious ideologies and violent politics of forces on the right and the left have overshadowed the idea of a liberal, tolerant society that India s founding fathers dreamed of, where many views would compete for public attention, where the motto live and let live would be the nation s guiding philosophy, and where India would be a liberal-democratic beacon for emerging nations of the developing world. Instead, the reality today is that far too many Indians see pluralism as phony and tolerant secularism as irrelevant to an existence centred on narrow religious, regional or ethnic identities. Pointing out flaws in the Indian version of secularism, where there is no strict separation of church and state, Adhikari shows how governments have often buckled to please one vote bank or the other, thus posing a threat to the collective vision of India. If these trends are not checked, he warns, the very idea of India may be in jeopardy. This timely, thought-provoking essay is a plea to build and sustain a truly liberal society. The questions it poses have an important bearing on the country s future.