 Sarai Khalil, in the Chandani Chowk area of the walled city of Delhi. In this muhala or locality, the Muslims are in majority. It is the time for the Hindu festival of brotherhood, Raksha Bandhan. When women tie a string around their brother's wrists as a symbol of love and affection, and the brothers promise lifelong protection and care. Over the years, this festival has come to symbolise brotherhood in more ways than one. For here in the alleyways of Sarai Khalil, we see girls of Muslim households making the traditional rakhis. My name is Sajida. I make rakhi once a year and I have been making rakhi for 3-4 months. My parents also make rakhi and I also make rakhi. These rakhis will then be sold by Hindu traders to Hindu women for a Hindu festival. For these girls in the alleyways of Chandani Chowk, this is no novelty. But for social scientists, it is yet another tangible evidence of a composite culture and a cultural continuity. It could have been easy for those who assumed the responsibility of a truncated India in 1947 to have accorded special privileges to the majority community. Instead, they looked deep within the Indian heritage, much beyond the mere 200 years of colonial rule, to establish a free India, where every citizen, irrespective of his faith, has equal rights, has equal privileges. Redefining secularism within the Indian ethos, article 25 of the Indian constitution enshrined the right to profess, practice and propagate religion freely. 50 years since independence, India is home to 120 million Muslims, the second largest concentration in the whole world. There are almost 27 million Christians and 20 million Sikhs, besides almost 850 million Hindus. India is not a melting pot, but it is a mosaic. It is not that you get everything and you melt it into one uniform religion or uniform thought, no. India has always permitted diversities and this is why, with this globalization of the world which is taking place, where identities are now striking and wanting to have their own positions in their societies and others, India is the one which is able to offer a history of what you call this coexistence. Communal violence still manages to raise its ugly head from time to time, yet fundamentalism is a challenge that the Indian people are confronting head on, battling the scourge of religious fanatics. The Indian population realize that solutions to the problems of democracy is more democracy and it is in the mantra of the vote that almost a billion people find their checks and balances. The immediate past has shown that narrow majoritism is futile in the quest for power. In the process, the people themselves are realizing that the forces of cohesion and that bond Indians into a nation are far stronger and complex than simplistic rhetoric of religious populism. Social scientists maintain that the triumph of cultural pluralism for the past 50 years is a tribute to the resilience of India's civilizational heritage.