On December 12, via an interim order, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court docket, led by the present Chief Justice of India Sanjiv Khanna, delivered a quick respite towards the rising tide of communalism. The bench has quickly barred trial courts from admitting petitions and passing “efficient orders” permitting surveys in circumstances associated to the Locations of Worship Act, 1991 till the validity of the 1991 regulation is set. In so doing, the Supreme Court docket has put a brief lid on the Pandora’s field opened by former Chief Justice Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud’s observations within the Gyanvapi mosque case that merely permitting a “survey” didn’t violate the Locations of Worship Act.
However this respite could be short-lived. Open majoritarianism and shrill bigotry are actually the dominant tradition of our polity. We’re permitting this to remodel us from a society that, in its founding second, audaciously tried to construct a way of civicness on the idea of mutual respect and tolerance sure by constitutional values of secularism into one which has fallen prey to insecure, aggressive pettiness. The plethora of petitions to look at whether or not temples stood the place mosques do and reinterpret historical past are an consequence of this. The violence in Sambhal after the survey workforce arrived in late November is only a fleeting glimpse of what may lie forward. To confront this malaise, we desperately want to revive our secular ethos. The true tragedy is that secularism at the moment has only a few champions.
It wasn’t at all times this fashion. On December 6, when India marked the thirty second anniversary of the demolition of the Babri Masjid, social media was stuffed with newspaper articles and debates of the time. “Nation’s Disgrace” is how India As we speak described the act of demolition, capturing the truth that even because the second was being celebrated in some quarters, there remained lively political contestation. This contestation was framed inside the grammar of our constitutional, secular ethos and it’s this that generated the stress, on the top of the Ram Janmabhoomi motion, for Parliament to cross the Locations of Worship Act, 1991. This was acknowledged within the Ayodhya judgment that noticed that the Act was “intrinsically associated to the obligations of a secular State…to protect and shield the equality of all faiths as a vital constitutional worth”.
It’s a measure of how far we have now come that secularism at the moment has no defenders. Those that communicate in its identify are labelled “anti-Hindu”. Its core worth — the principled distance between the State and faith — has few takers.
That is partly a consequence of aggressive occasion politics that diminished the secular preferrred to a politics of appeasement and vote banks, thus opening the doorways for secularism’s political opponents to delegitimise the perfect whereas concurrently legitimising majoritarianism as the choice. That is Hindutva’s core enchantment. However its actual success has been its potential to successfully lure the ideological opposition, pushing it to answer the Hindutva juggernaut via the prism of religiosity quite than a reclamation of the constitutional preferrred. That is finest illustrated via the Congress whose personal complicity in undermining the secular precept is nicely recognised. Publish-2014, as soon as the BJP and Hindutva emerged dominant, the Congress, floundering on the again of its personal evaluation of being a “Muslim occasion”, spent years taking part in with the thought of sentimental majoritarianism, looking for to show its Hindu credentials and remained remarkably reticent when it got here to defending civil liberties and rights of Muslims.
Extra not too long ago, Rahul Gandhi’s ideological response to Hindutva has turn into sharper. Nevertheless, it’s a response that has rigorously averted the political vocabulary of secularism, selecting as an alternative to attract on the grammar of faith to tell apart between “Hinduism” of peaceable tolerance and Hindutva. This can be a crucial dialogue that India should have. Nevertheless, within the political realm, it falls quick, for it fails to articulate and defend norms to manipulate and follow tolerance and coexistence in society.
The secular ethos envisaged within the Structure — that every one religions are equal within the eyes of the regulation and that the State shall not propagate one explicit faith — offered the inspiration for governing a society that negotiates a number of identities to coexist in safety and concord. It’s this ethos in our polity that pushed Parliament to defend the constitutional preferrred and legislate the Locations of Worship Act, 1991. The attention {that a} continuous rekindling of disputed pasts and the remaking of historical past will solely lead us to a path of violence and hate-motivated this laws. It was a political response to the politics of resentment and based mostly on the popularity that the secular ethos should form our norms of governance.
The Supreme Court docket has given the nation non permanent respite. Our polity and society should shed its disenchantment with the secular preferrred and restore its ethos. It’s not too late.
Yamini Aiyar is a visiting senior fellow at Brown College.The views expressed are private
