Breaking down the question
This is a two-part question, and both parts must be answered fully. The first part is definitional and comparative — distinguish secularism from secularisation. These two words are constantly confused, and the examiner is testing whether you can keep them apart: one is a normative-political doctrine about how the state should relate to religion, the other is a sociological process describing the changing place of religion in society.
The second part is analytical and empirical — assess the nature and extent of secularisation in contemporary India. Here you must marshal evidence for and against the claim that Indian society is becoming secularised, and arrive at a qualified judgement. The word extent signals that the examiner wants a measured verdict, not a yes-or-no answer. A strong response first draws the conceptual distinction cleanly and then uses it to interrogate the Indian case.
How to approach it
Open with the distinction. Secularism is a political ideal — a principle of state neutrality towards religions; in the classical Western form it means separation of church and state, while the Indian variant, often called principled distance, means equal respect for all faiths (sarva dharma sama bhava) rather than strict separation. Secularisation, by contrast, is a sociological process — the declining social significance of religion, described by Bryan Wilson and others through the components of differentiation, rationalisation, disenchantment and privatisation of belief.
Then turn to India. Present the evidence for secularisation — a secular constitution, the spread of science and rational-legal authority, functional differentiation of law, education and economy from religious control, urbanisation and inter-caste mixing. Balance it against powerful counter-evidence — the resilience and even resurgence of religion in public life, communal and ethno-religious mobilisation, the persistence of ritual, and Srinivas's observation that mobility often takes the religious form of Sanskritisation. Engage T. N. Madan's argument that secularisation is a poor fit for South Asia. Our notes on secularization in India develop this debate. Conclude that India shows selective, uneven secularisation rather than the wholesale decline predicted by classical theory.
Model answer
The two terms sound alike and are routinely conflated, but they belong to different orders of discourse. Secularism is a normative and political doctrine; secularisation is a descriptive sociological process. To distinguish them is the first task of any serious answer.
Secularism concerns the proper relationship between the state and religion. In its classical Western form it prescribes a wall of separation between church and state, confining religion to the private sphere. The Indian conception is different: rather than divorcing the state from religion, it commits the state to equal respect for all faiths and to non-discrimination among them — sarva dharma sama bhava, or what Rajeev Bhargava calls principled distance. Indian secularism thus permits the state to engage with religion, even to reform it, provided it does so even-handedly. Secularism, in either form, is a prescription about how things ought to be.
Secularisation, by contrast, is an account of how things are changing. It refers to the process by which religion loses its hold over social institutions and consciousness. Bryan Wilson defined it as the declining social significance of religion, and the concept is usually unpacked into several strands: differentiation, whereby spheres such as law, education, medicine and the economy detach themselves from religious control and acquire their own autonomous logic; rationalisation and disenchantment, whereby a scientific and calculative outlook displaces magical and sacred explanations; and privatisation, whereby faith becomes a matter of individual choice rather than collective obligation. Secularisation is therefore a matter of social fact, to be measured, not a value to be upheld.
Turning to contemporary India, the evidence is genuinely mixed, and this is the heart of the answer. On one side, several markers of secularisation are unmistakable. The Constitution establishes a secular state; rational-legal authority and a modern bureaucracy govern public life; science and technology enjoy prestige; education, medicine and law now operate by their own professional norms rather than scriptural sanction. Urbanisation, industrial employment, inter-caste and inter-regional mixing, and the spread of a market economy all loosen the grip of ascriptive religious community. In this institutional and structural sense, differentiation has clearly advanced.
On the other side, the evidence for a decline in the significance of religion is weak. Religion has not retreated from the public sphere; it has, if anything, become more visible. Communal and ethno-religious mobilisation, the political use of religious identity, mass pilgrimages, televised rituals and the flourishing of new godmen and cults all suggest vitality rather than eclipse. M. N. Srinivas's concept of Sanskritisation reminds us that social mobility in India has often taken a religious form — a rising caste adopts higher-caste ritual practices rather than shedding ritual altogether — so that modernisation and religiosity advance together. T. N. Madan pressed this point forcefully, arguing that secularisation as conceived in the West is an alien and implausible expectation in South Asia, where religion remains constitutive of personal and collective identity; to treat secularism as though it presupposed secularisation, he warned, was to misread the society.
How, then, should we assess the extent of secularisation in India? The classical thesis of a uniform, irreversible decline of religion plainly does not hold. What we observe instead is selective and uneven change. Secularisation has proceeded furthest at the level of institutional differentiation — the autonomy of law, economy and administration from religious control — and least at the level of belief and identity, where religion retains, and in some spheres has regained, its salience. It is stronger among some urban, educated strata and weaker in others; it coexists with waves of revival. India therefore exhibits a distinctive pattern in which structural modernisation does not entail the privatisation or disenchantment predicted by European theory.
In sum, secularism and secularisation must not be conflated: one is a political principle of state neutrality, the other a social process of religion's changing significance. Contemporary India has adopted the first as constitutional doctrine while undergoing only a partial, differentiated and contested form of the second. The Indian experience thus stands as an important corrective to the assumption that modernity necessarily secularises society.
Examiner's perspective
The commonest failure on this question is to blur the two concepts, treating secularism and secularisation as synonyms and thereby answering neither part. The examiner is watching precisely for the distinction between a political doctrine and a sociological process, and a script that establishes it early has already secured the foundation.
The second discriminator is the quality of the empirical assessment. Weak answers assert either that India is secularising or that it is not; strong answers show that the outcome depends on which dimension one examines — advanced differentiation of institutions alongside persistent, even resurgent, religiosity in identity and public life. Deploying Wilson on the components of secularisation, Madan on its poor fit for South Asia, and Srinivas on Sanskritisation as religious mobility signals command of the debate. A closing verdict of selective, uneven secularisation — with India as a corrective to classical theory — is what lifts the answer into the top band.