How is secularism faring in India? Reasonably well, I believe, because larger socio-economic forces are pushing us in this direction. Indian secularism is driven not so much by ideology and high thinking as by the pursuit of self-interest. It doesn't look good in close-ups.

But move some distance away, and the patchwork looks infinitely better. It's a bit like capitalism. Viewed at the micro level, capitalism is driven by crass emotions like greed and fear. But at the aggregate level capitalism ends up delivering a lot of public good.

Indian secularism is like that: it is a product of two forces that have nothing to do with secularism. One is the power of the market; the other is the market for power. The power of the marketplace is gradually dissolving differences of caste, community and religion.

And the market for political power is bringing together forces representing narrow communal or sectarian ideologies as well as non-ideological groups to maximise their collective gains. (I use the words sectarian and communal to mean the same thing; secularism, for me, means not discriminating between people of different religious or sectarian affiliations. It makes little sense to use the word secular only in the religious context).

The power of the market is clearly playing an important role in building Indian secularism. When you travel in an overcrowded DTC bus or a Mumbai suburban train, you have to travel crushed between a Dalit, a Muslim or an upper caste Hindu no matter what your personal prejudices in this matter.

Over time, this moderates or dissolves prejudices. The market for labour that brings Indians of all hues to urban centres is a secularising influence.

Similarly, the entertainment market can only produce products that people want to buy. It has to recruit for sheer talent. It matters little anymore whether Shah Rukh Khan is a Muslim or Hrithik Roshan a Hindu. Both have succeeded, and both will fade out sometime, depending on how they fare in the competitive market for acting talent.

When Narayana Murthy and Azim Premji recruit software engineers, they cannot afford to look at the religious or caste background of the job applicant. Punters who buy Wipro shares do not wonder whether they are investing in a Hindu company or Muslim one.

They are looking at Premji's ability to generate wealth, not his religious background. People who now want to forcibly impose job quotas on the private sector in the name of social justice need to rethink.

If the idea is to get Dalits and other poor sections of society recruited by the thousand in the corporate sector, they should first abolish minimum wages, or at least lower its floor. Job reservations, on the contrary, prevent the market from functioning efficiently in favour of the poor.

In fact, allowing the labour market to find its own level will automatically work in favour of the poorest of the poor. Ask our BPO companies. India's clear advantage is cost arbitrage. If BPO hires had to be paid US minimum wages, there would be no BPO boom worth the name.

In fact, the underprivileged have succeeded only in areas where remuneration is market-determined. Has anybody noticed that minorities have a disproportionate share of jobs in sectors like automotive garages, retailing, and entertainment -- all boom sectors today?

The reason is that Muslims and other minorities were left out of the reservations game in the past; they had to seek self-employment at whatever rates the market was willing to recruit them. Now that the jobs engine in government is stalling, they will have no regrets about what they have achieved through sheer hard work. That's market secularism at work again.

The other reason why secularism has a reasonably good future in India is that there is now a real market for political power. And Indians have found a way to negotiate their way into power-sharing arrangements through electoral democracy.

Power sharing can happen in two ways: one is to allow entire parties to function as coalitions of sectarian groups (as the Congress was at the time of Nehru), or one can have separate parties directly representing the various sub-groups in various regions. After experimenting with the former, the country now seems to be veering towards the latter.

The last General Election offered a mandate not for this ideology or that coalition, but should be seen as a simple vindication of the trend towards power-sharing among various regional, communal and sectarian groups. Non-sectarian parties may or may not be a part of this process, but power-sharing is here to stay.

Each sectarian group (whether it is Mayawati's BSP, Laloo's RJD or Ramadoss's PMK or the Muslim League in some pockets) is now actively negotiating its share of power at the Centre and states, based roughly on its ability to pitch in with votes from numerically significant caste or communal groups.

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