In a truly secular tion-state, there cannot be any question of any religious majority or minorities. In India, it is obviously the Hindus who form the religious majority, and the fact of life that most ‘secularists’ hesitate to admit is that it is Hinduism, with its offshoots in the forms of Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism, that forms the tive or indigenous faith of this country. However, since relatively smaller faiths like Buddhism, Jainism and Buddhism have diverged out of the pristine way of life that Hinduism fundamentally is, they are bracketed as ‘religious minorities’ for the sake of formal segregation for various welfare schemes distribution purposes. But it is not these groups along with Christianity that concern the typical Indian ‘secularists’, including of course a whole lot of ‘liberal’ intellectuals, not just the vast political brigade led by the Congress. The only religious minority that concerns them is the Muslim population, the largest religious minority in the country. It is this population, with its proven potential to be allowed to be exploited as a vote bank for cheap electoral gains to be earned by ‘secular’ politicians, that has remained the ‘minorities’ concern in our pseudo-secular political discourse. Therefore, we do not hear of the singular word minority, but of its plural, minorities. And therefore, when we hear the word minorities, we are asked to accept it as people who practise and profess Islam alone– the Muslims – and not as people who practise and profess faiths other than Islam such as Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Christianity (how can we forget that Christianity forms such an overwhelming faith as in Northeast India?) etc. This is a very serious aberration fraught with the danger of creating a sharp and irreparably divisive polarity in our tiol discourse. In fact this has already happened. And Assam is a classic case, accept it or not.