Dec 17, 2024 09:12 PM IST
Supreme Court temporarily bars trials under the Places of Worship Act, highlighting the need to restore India’s secular ethos amid rising communalism.
On December 12, through an interim order, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court, led by the current Chief Justice of India Sanjiv Khanna, delivered a brief respite against the rising tide of communalism. The bench has temporarily barred trial courts from admitting petitions and passing “effective orders” allowing surveys in cases related to the Places of Worship Act, 1991 until the validity of the 1991 law is determined. In so doing, the Supreme Court has put a temporary lid on the Pandora’s box opened by former Chief Justice Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud’s observations in the Gyanvapi mosque case that merely allowing a “survey” did not violate the Places of Worship Act.
But this respite may well be short-lived. Open majoritarianism and shrill bigotry are now the dominant culture of our polity. We are allowing this to transform us from a society that, in its founding moment, audaciously attempted to build a sense of civicness on the basis of mutual respect and tolerance bound by constitutional values of secularism into one that has fallen prey to insecure, aggressive pettiness. The plethora of petitions to examine whether temples stood where mosques do and reinterpret history are an outcome of this. The violence in Sambhal after the survey team arrived in late November is just a fleeting glimpse of what could lie ahead. To confront this malaise, we desperately need to restore our secular ethos. The real tragedy is that secularism today has very few champions.
It wasn’t always this way. On December 6, when India marked the 32nd anniversary of the demolition of the Babri Masjid, social media was full of newspaper articles and debates of the time. “Nation’s Shame” is how India Today described the act of demolition, capturing the fact that even as the moment was being celebrated in some quarters, there remained active political contestation. This contestation was framed within the grammar of our constitutional, secular ethos and it is this that generated the pressure, at the height of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, for Parliament to pass the Places of Worship Act, 1991. This was acknowledged in the Ayodhya judgment that observed that the Act was “intrinsically related to the obligations of a secular State…to preserve and protect the equality of all faiths as an essential constitutional value”.
It is a measure of how far we have come that secularism today has no defenders. Those who speak in its name are labelled “anti-Hindu”. Its core value — the principled distance between the State and religion — has few takers.
This is partly a consequence of competitive party politics that reduced the secular ideal to a politics of appeasement and vote banks, thus opening the doors for secularism’s political opponents to delegitimise the ideal while simultaneously legitimising majoritarianism as the alternative. This is Hindutva’s core appeal. But its real success has been its ability to effectively trap the ideological opposition, pushing it to respond to the Hindutva juggernaut through the prism of religiosity rather than a reclamation of the constitutional ideal. This is best illustrated through the Congress whose own complicity in undermining the secular principle is well recognised. Post-2014, once the BJP and Hindutva emerged dominant, the Congress, floundering on the back of its own assessment of being a “Muslim party”, spent years playing with the idea of soft majoritarianism, seeking to prove its Hindu credentials and remained remarkably reticent when it came to defending civil liberties and rights of Muslims.
More recently, Rahul Gandhi’s ideological response to Hindutva has become sharper. However, it is a response that has carefully avoided the political vocabulary of secularism, choosing instead to draw on the grammar of religion to distinguish between “Hinduism” of peaceful tolerance and Hindutva. This is a critical dialogue that India must have. However, in the political realm, it falls short, for it fails to articulate and defend norms to govern and practice tolerance and coexistence in society.
The secular ethos envisaged in the Constitution — that all religions are equal in the eyes of the law and that the State shall not propagate one particular religion — provided the foundation for governing a society that negotiates multiple identities to coexist in security and harmony. It is this ethos in our polity that pushed Parliament to defend the constitutional ideal and legislate the Places of Worship Act, 1991. The awareness that a continual rekindling of disputed pasts and the remaking of history will only lead us to a path of violence and hate-motivated this legislation. It was a political response to the politics of resentment and based on the recognition that the secular ethos must shape our norms of governance.
The Supreme Court has given the country temporary respite. Our polity and society must shed its disenchantment with the secular ideal and restore its ethos. It is not too late.
Yamini Aiyar is a visiting senior fellow at Brown University.The views expressed are personal
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