A New Idea of India: Individual Rights in a Civilisational State

by Harsh Gupta 'Madhusudan'

The renowned British philosopher Roger Scruton remarked while building on the work of constitutional jurist Jeremy Rabkin, ‘The nation-state has been the greatest guarantor of freedom in the modern world, precisely because it establishes a territorial, rather than religious, jurisdiction.

Seen from this civilisational framework, the formation of any new Western country would simply mean a rearrangement of internal civilisational boundaries akin to the creation of a new state such as Telangana or Jharkhand within India. On the other hand, the so-called liberation of Kashmir—whether through ‘azaadi’ or a formal merger with Pakistan—would mean the loss of territory to a hostile civilisational unit. That is the reality.

one. If the United States can sacrifice around 6,00,000 of its young men in the sparsely populated 1860s and temporarily suspend civil liberties to preserve the Union and break the back of slavery, India can, and will, fight to keep the Union and defeat theocracy.

Most of the Hindu-dominated areas are in present-day Tharparkar district, with Nagarparkar, even today, having a Hindu majority. This area is also where dozens of Hindu girls have reportedly been abducted, raped, forcibly married and converted.

Theocracies are not hospitable to non-adherents of the official State religion.

In 1950, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru signed the Nehru-Liaquat pact with Pakistani PM Liaquat Ali Khan, in which India promised to look after its Muslim minority and Pakistan, its non-Muslim minority. India has honoured its half of the pact. During this period, the population proportion of Muslims in India has increased from under 10 per cent to over 14 per cent. But in Pakistan and Bangladesh, perhaps one of the biggest ethnic cleansings of the past century has occurred with 60 million fewer minorities than there should have been. This amendment attempts to protect six besieged minorities from extinction.

The CAA is similar to the Lautenberg Amendment in the US,92 which prioritises some Christians and Jews from the former Soviet Union, as well as religious minorities from Iran.

Nothing could be further from the truth. No Indian political group of any significance wants India to stop being a democracy, because there is a recognition that democracy is the only realistic way of keeping India united for the foreseeable future. And a democratic India simply cannot absorb 350 million more Muslim citizens when it has not been able to integrate the existing minority citizens legally (given that India still has religion-based civil laws), or more importantly, socially.

Girilal Jain, the former editor of the Times of India, went on to say, only half in jest, that ‘Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the greatest

benefactor of Hindus in modern times, if he was not a Hindu in disguise.

Protections for homosexual Indians, thanks to the repeal of Section 377, were not extended to the region. Many Hindus and Sikhs who had come from what is now Pakistan or PoK could not vote in state elections (though they could vote in national elections), despite residing in the erstwhile state for decades. The abrogation of Article 370 has rightfully and irrevocably integrated Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh with India, and brought Indian constitutional values and legal guarantees to millions of people residing in the region.

I believe that the word secular is the biggest lie since Independence.

Speaking in 1955 during the parliamentary debate on the Hindu Code Bill2 that sought to reform personal laws for the Hindu community, Acharya J.B. Kripalani said: I charge you with communalism because you are bringing forward a law about monogamy only for Hindu community. Take it from me that the Muslim community is prepared to have it but you are not brave enough to do it.3

Yet, it is Nehru who is upheld as a paragon of liberal and secular values, and generation after generation of intellectuals has internalised his dubious standards.

There are many people who believe that the country must have a uniform civil code. My own view is that this is not necessary as long as the country’s economic progress is not hampered.

In the case of the Muslim community, it is clear that one reason for its backwardness is the community’s attitude towards women, especially when it comes to education and employment, as documented in the 2006 Rajinder Sachar committee report.

Many intellectuals and politicians dismiss as ‘communal’ those advocating for dissolution of identity distinctions enforced by the State. Acharya Kripalani would have been called communal today.

it is high time the Indian State breaks from Nehru’s construct of seeing religious minorities as ‘separate from us’ and stops indulging in the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’, to borrow the phrase used by former US president George W. Bush,

Hamid Dalwai, a Marathi Muslim who faced ostracism from his community for being a radical reformist, understood this. He advocated women’s emancipation through education and employment at the social level, and for a liberal–secular government at the political level. In his 1969 book Muslim Politics in Secular India, he critiqued minority politics for continuing to further the separatist mindset of the pre-Partition Muslim League.

Dalwai wrote that Indian Muslim intellectuals are more likely to blame Hindus rather than introspect.

Reform is the need of the hour, and entails confronting what Hamid Dalwai characterised as ‘obscurantist medievalism’,14 rather than evading it with the deceptive labels of ‘minority protection’ and ‘secularism

Scholars like the anthropologist Partha Chatterjee have pointed out that the Indian Right is simply not threatened by genuine secularism,

The Muslims in the country have grown by nearly 50 per cent more than the Indian Religionists for the third decade in a row.

In their everyday lives though, Indians continue to resist the divisive messages issued by the political class and are forging a deeper, common identity. In India’s melting pot—and urbanising landscape—customs are cross-pollinating more than ever before, making for a unique and constantly evolving culture.

themselves modernizers and secularists—the two terms are interchangeable—should shirk the logic of their philosophy of life.

As described earlier, even as Hindus enjoyed increased social freedoms, they were denied control over their temples and their ability to run Hindu-oriented educational institutions was eroded to the point of debilitation.

One can only bluntly describe this practice as bribery, and it has enjoyed the highest judicial endorsement and constitutional protection.

By law, a Hindu cannot be a member of the NCMEI. While non-Hindu Supreme Court judges or a local district collector can be trusted to judge knotty theological issues pertaining to Hinduism and the government has the power to appoint non-Hindus as trustees of Hindu temple trusts, it considers it fit to explicitly exclude Hindus from a statutory public body such as NCMEI.

He promised Central assistance for recruitment and posting of Urdu language teachers in primary and upper primary schools in areas where 25 per cent of the population spoke Urdu. The government created special scholarship schemes for minority students, thus discriminating between Indian citizens on the basis of religion.

On 9 December 2006, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asserted that Muslims would have first claim on India’s resources while addressing the 52nd meeting of the Planning Commission’s National Development Council (NDC).

In the same year, the government tried to conduct a survey on the religious affiliations of India’s soldiers, inviting the ire of Army chief J.J. Singh.28 ‘Our system for entry into the armed forces and for enrolment is based on merit and on the ability to perform the task that might be assigned,’

In March 2013, Shinde wrote to Minister of Minority Affairs K. Rahman Khan that special Muslim-only fast-track courts would be set up for trial of terror cases.

In 2018, we saw a promise made during the Assembly election campaign by the Congress party in Karnataka to provide the coveted tag of minority to Lingayats,36 a prominent Hindu community that traditionally votes for the BJP.

Uttar Pradesh, which was run by a ‘secular’ Samajwadi Party government during 2012–2017, created a number of Muslim-only government welfare schemes.

In September 2013, India saw heinous violence in UP under the Samajwadi Party state government and a Congress-led government, both of whom were said to be secular. Over four dozen people were killed, and 50,000 were displaced, yet scarcely any question was asked of Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav or the Union government.39 In 2017, UP supposedly turned ‘communal’ on Yogi Adityanath’s election as chief minister.

Among the first actions taken by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath was to introduce English language education at the nursery level. ‘The traditional and the modern should blend. We should have an education system which promotes nationalism but is modern,’ Adityanath said.

The propensity to ban English language education in government schools should be seen in terms of whom it helps. When public schools don’t offer English as a language of instruction, it

is schools run by Christian missionary and evangelical forces, which are exempted from government control and whose agenda it is to pursue relig...

There is a long-standing practice of state governments dipping into the coffers of temple trusts to supplement government revenue and fund the state’s expenditure.

BJP’s M. Venkaiah Naidu, a legislator at the time and currently India’s vice-president, had said, ‘It is an encroachment on the affairs of a Hindu religious endowment.’ S. Jaipal Reddy of the Janata Party, who subsequently went on to have a long career in public life with the Congress party, at the time had said that ‘Government should not tamper with the funds of religious organisations. It is more difficult and sensitive to touch funds of organisations of religions other than Hinduism.

As the politician–scholar Arun Shourie documented in his masterful work Falling Over Backwards,47 the YSR government tried relentlessly to create job reservations for Muslims, starting June 2004, but kept being rebuffed by the judiciary, which held that such reservations were unconstitutional.

In another incident, an official enquiry found that forty-four non-Hindu officials had been recruited for the Tirumala temple by the government.

In addition to providing funds for Aliah University, the Mamata Banerjee government created six Industrial Training Institutes and six polytechnic colleges exclusively for Muslims.

Pradip Chatterjee told the courts that cases against rioters who ran amok in Kolkata in 2007 and attacked writer Taslima Nasrin should be dropped.

Where was the army of self-described secular–liberal intellectuals and activists when the state government dropped charges against the arsonists and rioters to appease religious bigots?

Until 2019, India had the dubious distinction of allowing the abominable practice of triple talaaq, whereby a Muslim man could divorce his wife by simply uttering the word ‘talaaq’ three times. When the BJP-led Union government introduced the pro-women rights bill to end the practice, Mamata Banerjee said it ‘will not help women and that it was only intended to incite the Muslim community

the Congress party declared that it would bring back triple talaaq if it won the 2019 general election.

The Congress party claimed that this was done to comply with a Karnataka High Court order requiring the Muzrai Department, which administers 34,559 temples across the state, to bring all Hindu, Jain, Sikh and Buddhist religious institutions under its ambit86—of course, institutions belonging to minority communities were not to be touched.

To appease Muslims in the state, the Siddaramaiah government also started celebrating the birth anniversary of Tipu Sultan, a ruler known as the ‘Tyrant of Mysore’, who destroyed many Hindu temples and murdered thousands

faith. In 2017, the Kerala state government announced a new housing scheme for divorcees and widows from the minority communities with an outlay of 30 crore, with each beneficiary getting 2.5 lakh of financial support.