An aeroplane is not a cow. Pious Hindus may be used to seeing their most holy mother-creature anointed with a red tika on an auspicious occasion, but an aeroplane with a tika is rather over the top in piety. And not any old plane at that. Not even a private jet bearing the marks of its owner’s religious leanings. This is a new Boeing Business Jet acquired for the Indian air force’s VIP squadron, highly advanced in flight, communications, security technology and in the technology of luxury and beauty. It represents the Indian State. The aeroplane was ceremonially anointed before its inaugural flight by the president of India while the air force chief broke a coconut in a ritual invocation of good. Indians seem to have a touching faith in coconuts; ships are regularly launched after a coconut-breaking ceremony. But an air force chief breaking a coconut for an aeroplane alongside the Indian president ready with the tika is somehow far more disconcerting than that.

There is nothing wrong with either ceremonies or rituals in themselves. But it has to be asked why the highest office-bearers of a secular State should choose only those ceremonial forms that derive from one of the many religions in the country. That it is the majority religion makes the choice even more dubious. It cannot be glossed over by invoking tradition: such a tradition should not have been there in the first place. And if insensitivity and a lack of imagination have fostered it, then this is the time to change. The thinking behind such rituals could be described as anything from absurd to thoughtless and insensitive to callously assertive. India is learning hard lessons about the results of politicizing religion; such a ceremony exposes the roots of confusion from which politicization begins. A country becomes identified with a religion, whatever its reality as a secular republic. Besides, no longer are the effects of such confusion confined within a country. The globalization of terror also means globalized distrust and misunderstanding, fed by the champions of the clash-of-civilizations thesis. Much of the world is only too eager to identify nations with faiths; it simplifies things. India’s secularism has vast significance in its immediate neighbourhood; it is folly to invoke the semantics of religion — any religion — in a State ceremony. The message generated within and without the country’s borders is dangerously misleading.