Muhammad Ali
Jinnah got what he wanted for Indian Musalmans though in time, their Quranic
zeal turned Pakistan into a Rogue State. What of India, the product of an irony
of a partition in that while some Musalmans
walked away with one-fourth of its land, others stayed back to nurse their
separatist dogma in its truncated bosom?
While the Hindu
nationalists lamented about the loss of their ancient land, the Musalman
intellectuals were alarmed at their reduced numbers vis-à-vis the Hindus. Even
as the Golwalkars articulated the Hindu frustration in shrill tones, the
Maulana Azads voiced the Muslim apprehensions in secular tunes. Whatever, as
Pakistan became an Islamic State for the Musalmans, India remained a
habitat of varied interest groups, the Musalmans included! While the
Indian political classes were beset with a sense of loss that partition brought
in in its wake, the Hindu intellectuals were upset by the age-old caste guilt
that the reform movement occasioned in their collective consciousness.
It was in such
a setting that India ventured to formulate a constitution for itself, of
course, piloted by Babasaheb Ambedkar, the intellectual giant from the depressed
classes. Yet the end product, touted as the bulkiest of the written
constitutions in the comity of nations, turned out to be an exercise in
selective amnesia.
“WE THE PEOPLE
OF INDIA, reads the preamble of the Constitution of India, having solemnly
resolved to constitute India into a SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR DEMOCRATIC
REPUBLIC and to secure to all its citizens:
JUSTICE, social, economic, and political;
LIBERTY of status, expression, belief,
faith and worship;
EQUALITY of status and of opportunity;
And to promote among all
FRATERNITY assuring the dignity of the
individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation;
IN OUR CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY
this twenty-sixth day of November 1949, do HEREBY ADOPT, ENACT AND GIVE TO
OURSELVES THIS CONSTITUTION.”
None can fault
the lofty ideals of this august document but for the politicization of the
testament itself, i.e. by the induction of socialism into it. Strange it may
seem, won’t the socialistic slant negate the economic justice that it seeks to
provide? After all, socialism, as per the COD, is a political and economic
theory of social organization which advocates that the community as a whole
should own and control the means of production, distribution, and exchange. How
could there be an economic justice for an individual enterprising Indian then?
However,
mercifully in the end, PV Narasimha Rao, the Accidental Prime Minister, aided
by Dr. Manmohan Singh, his hand-picked Finance Minister, managed to extricate India
from the Nehruvian socialist grip to leave his lasting legacy as the ‘Architect
of Economic Reforms’. But that was not
before socialism wrecked Indian industry, stunted its enterprise, and ruined
its economy so much so that, for servicing its national debt, the country had
to pledge its gold for some sterling pounds.
But
before that, as if the religious leeway provided by Ambedkar & Co. to the
Musalmans and the Christians to upset the demography of India’s diminished
geography, Indira Gandhi, during her infamous emergency, unconstitutionally
amended the constitution to further stymie the Hindu majority though with the
laudable ‘Statement
of Objects and Reasons appended to the Constitution (Forty-fourth Amendment)
Bill, 1976 (Bill No. 91 of 1976)’ that was enacted as The Constitution
Forty-second Amendment Act, 1976, which avers that –
“A
Constitution to be living must be growing. If the impediments to the growth of
the Constitution are not removed, the Constitution will suffer a virtual
atrophy. The question of amending the Constitution for removing the
difficulties which have arisen in achieving the objective of socio-economic
revolution, which would end poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of
opportunity, has been engaging the active attention of Government and the
public for some years now.”
Be that as it may,
without specifying “the difficulties which have arisen in achieving the
objective of socio-economic revolution” in the said bill it was stated that –
“It is, therefore,
proposed to amend the Constitution to spell out expressly the high ideals of
socialism, secularism and the integrity of the nation, …” based on which the
Constitution (Forty-fourth Amendment) Act, 1976 had sought to remodel India as
"Sovereign Socialist Secular Democratic Republic.”
Whatever, as neither
the said bill nor the specified act defined what constitutes a secular
republic; we may turn to the COD that defines the hallowed but much abused word
thus:
1. concerned with the
affairs of this world; not spiritual or sacred.
2. (of education etc.) not concerned
with religion or religious belief
3. a. not ecclesiastical or monastic.
b. (of clergy) not bound by a religious
rule.
Hence, with regard to the above
–
1. Is not the spirit of our
secular republic against the State subsidy of the Haj (which the Supreme Court had to order to be given up in a
phased manner) as that amounts to its showing concern with the spiritual
matters of the Muslims?
2. Is not the penchant of the Musalmans for the madrasa education
for their children that stresses upon Islamic separatist dogma against the
spirit of our secular republic?
3. Is not the assertion of
the mullahs that they are bound by the sharia, the
rule book of Islam, tantamount to the negation of the secular ethos of our
remodeled republic?
Be that as it may, in spite of
Indira’s unholy amendment, as Indian constitution remained a holy cow,
Narasimha Rao had to let it go, besides, he happened to be a congressman and
had to run a minority government at that.
Nevertheless, the
article of the ‘Original’ Indian Constitution with regard to “Freedom of
conscience and free profession, practice and propagation of religion” exhorts
thus:
1. Subject to public order,
morality and health and to the other provisions of this Part, all persons are
equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess,
practice and propagate religion.
2. Nothing in this article
shall affect the operation of any existing law or prevent the State from making
any law-
(a) regulating
or restricting any economic, financial, political or other secular activity
which may be associated with religious practice;
(b) providing
for social welfare and reform or the throwing open of Hindu religious
institutions of a public character to all classes and sections of Hindus.”
Agreed, the
right of the citizen for the profession and practice of one’s religion is
unexceptionable for it constitutes the birthright. But, why an ordinary Indian
citizen should be concerned about the propagation of his faith
for the constitution to grant it to him? Besides, where does the right of an
Indian citizen for propagation of his faith leave his fellow citizen’s cultural
need for preservation of his own order, sanãtana dharma in case of the Hindus? After all, the right of propagation is
but the right to spread one’s religion, and one cannot do that without coming
into direct conflict with another’s religious faith or dharma, as the case may be, can any?
It’s thus, as one
citizen’s right to propagate his faith vitiates the right of another to profess
and practice his religion, India’s Constitution by granting the right for
propagation of one’s religion per se,
willy-nilly takes away another’s implied right for the preservation of his own
faith. Besides, to what avail is the right to propagate one’s religion for the
citizen rather than to fuel the zeal of the religious zealots for converting?
And what about
the ‘FRATERNITY assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and
integrity of the Nation’ that the constitution provides for! What of the individual
dignity of those Hindus whom the evangelists try to lure into the Christian
fold, for them to embrace the Son of an alien God! Thus, is not the creed of
the Church to propagate its faith that causes the poor of the land to lose
their dignity is at odds with our constitutional spirit itself? Besides, as the
raison d’être of religious propagation is conversion, wouldn’t that
individual right prove inimical to the unity and integrity of the Nation?
However, going
by the hell raised by the missionaries, the mullahs, their political
cohorts and the co-opted media, at any move by the State to disfavor fraudulent
conversions, the popular belief is that the right for propagation is without
any constitutional or moral strings attached to it! Only when the clamor for
the future partitions of India on religious lines picks up, would a Western
historian be able to spot the constitutional blind spots that gave rise to the
development! Yes, it needs Western intellectuals even to see it all in the
hindsight even, for India’s left-leaning political analysts and Islamapologist
liberals are notoriously blind to the realities of the Indian life and times.
Whatever,
what’s the rationale of religious propagation based on which the framers of the
constitution granted that to its citizens? Though Hinduism and Judaism, the
world’s oldest surviving religions, are content with their constituencies, it
is the Christianity and Islam, the new brands in the religious marketplace that
hanker for conversions, of course, having come into being through propagation.
Indeed, their religious spread worldwide is owing to their creed as enshrined
in their Scriptures per se. If
not all, most Christian missionaries and every Musalman mullah entertain
the dream of seeing the world turn all Christian or all Islamic as the case may
be; after all, that’s what their scriptures ordain and their religious creed
obliges them to do so, and in the Indian context one has to contend with the jihadi penchant to transform Hindustan
into Ghazwa-e-Hind.
It thus defies
logic as to how our constitution makers, who went about the exercise in the
immediate wake of the country’s partition on religious lines, thought it fit to
endorse the propagation of one’s faith, read the Christian and the Islamic, in
the Hindu midst! Well, it’s the illusionism of Gandhi that became the idealism
of the Congress which influenced the Constituent Assembly of the
just-partitioned India. And that shows. How strange then, that the constitution
exhibits a singular lack of application of mind of its framers to secure
India’s integrity as a constituent country for all times to come. Sadly thus,
the wise-heads of that time, not to speak of the foresight, lacked the
hindsight even. God forbid, they seemed to have unwittingly laid the seeds of a
future partition of the Hindustan, whose wings Jinnah had already truncated.
But, would this religious ‘constitutional’ error ever be erased from our
statute before history gets repeated! Doubtful though.
If all this were Ambedkar’s idea of a religious
safety valve for the disenchanted dalits, the then harijans, yet
it would be a betrayal of India’s cause. However, the true dalit emancipation
lies in bringing about the Hindu reformation from within and not in their
opting out of the faith, and surely that wouldn’t have been beyond Ambedkar’s
robust intellectual grasp. More significant is his own understanding of the
Islamic credo that he articulated thus:
“Hinduism is said to divide
people and in contrast, Islam is said to bind people together. This is only a
half truth. For Islam divides as inexorably as it binds. Islam is a close
corporation and the distinction that it makes between Muslims and non-Muslims
is a very real, very positive and very alienating distinction. The brotherhood
of Islam is not the universal brotherhood of man. It is the brotherhood of
Muslims for Muslims only. There is a fraternity, but its benefit is confined to
those within that corporation. For those who are outside the corporation, there
is nothing but contempt and enmity. The second defect of Islam is that it is a
system of social self-government and is incompatible with local self-government
because the allegiance of a Muslim does not rest on his domicile in the country
which is his but on the faith to which he belongs. To the Muslim ibi bene ibi
patria is unthinkable. Wherever there is the rule of Islam, there is his own
country. In other words, Islam can never allow a true Muslim to adopt India as
his motherland and regard a Hindu as his kith and kin. That is probably the
reason why Maulana Mahomed Ali, a great Indian but a true Muslim, preferred to
be buried in Jerusalem rather than in India.”
Thus, he would not have been
oblivious to the inimical consequences of affording a free religious leash to
the moulvis to lead the Musalmans on a separatist course in the
partitioned Hindu majority India, but yet that’s what precisely he did! Surely,
one can understand Babasaheb’s hurt that made him vow not to die a Hindu, and,
indeed, he did keep his word by embracing Buddhism before his death, but
whether he wished the comeuppance of the Hindus at the hands of the Musalmans, one might never know.
Now, over to the
“Freedom as to attendance at religious instruction or religious worship in
certain educational institutions” that the constitution stipulates.
(1) No religious instruction shall be
provided in any educational institution wholly maintained out of State funds.
(2) Nothing in clause (1) shall apply to
an educational institution which is administered by the State but has been
established under any endowment or trust which requires that religious
instruction shall be imparted in such institution.
(3) No person attending any educational
institution recognized by the State or receiving aid out of State funds shall
be required to take part in any religious instruction that may be imparted in
such institution or to attend any religious worship that may be conducted in
such institution or in any premises attached thereto unless such person or, if
such person is a minor, his guardian has given his consent thereto.”
The sum and
substance of the freedom of religious instruction is that the State, in true
secular spirit, is expected to keep itself away from it (religious instruction)
in the physical sense, and no more. However, the catch here is that the religious
education is fine so long as the government does not fund it for that allows
the State to retain its secular pretence by keeping itself overtly out of
religion. Even otherwise, one would expect the constitutional makers to address
the content of the religious education to serve the needs of the communities
concerned, without compromising the general public order and good, but they
failed ‘India that is Bharat’ in that respect as well.
Well, every
community needs some amongst them to undergo religious education to meet its
spiritual and social needs in accordance with the tenets of its faith and
feelings. That should at once be the scope as well as the limitation of the
religious education, isn’t it? So as to cater to these legitimate needs of a
given religious group, the required religious education with or without the
government funding forms a fundamental communal right of the members of that
group. Right, but what if in the name of freedom of religious
instruction, the dogmas of such faiths, given to deride the religious beliefs
of fellow citizens, are sought to be inculcated in an unwieldy number of members
of that community? Won’t such a move hamper the secular character of the
country besides inculcating religious bigotry in the mind-set of any given
community?
Obviously, the
framers of the constitution, but for Ambedkar, arguably Islamic naive, couldn’t
delve deep enough into the vexatious subject of religious intolerance of the
practicing faiths in the country. What is worse, this supposed constitutional
religious goodness came in handy for the ugly politician to turn it into an
exploitative mask for the minorities’ votes in the election seasons. It is one
thing to espouse the cause of the minorities
and another to abet the bigotry of the Musalmans
and the prejudices of the Christians. Sadly, for the minorities, moreso for the
Musalmans our politicians tend to be
on the right side of their wrong issues to the benefit of none, save
themselves.
Yet, it has become fashionable in the
Indian politico-social discourse to juxtapose secularism and communalism that
is with a matching ignorance about the latter for communalism is “a principle
of political organization based on federated communes.” No wonder that even seventy-one years after
its independence, as India is still groping for its political direction in an
ideological darkness, thanks to the Semitic promiscuity that Indian
constitution grants, for the human rights activists, the Musalmans and the Xians holding on to their scriptural dogmas is
kosher, but the right of the Hindus to articulate their religious sentiments or
cultural concerns, and / or both is sheer religious intolerance, and that’s
perplexing.
In the light of the above may be seen the
hollowness of the fundamental duties Indira’s infamous amendment imposes upon
the citizens that are rarely, if ever, fulfilled by the rulers themselves.
1. While it is incumbent upon the
citizenry “to promote harmony and the spirit of common brotherhood amongst all
the people of India transcending religious, linguistic and regional or
sectional diversities; to renounce practices derogatory to the dignity of women”
-
- the political ethos has been to
cynically reap electoral dividends by exacerbating social dissensions based on region,
religion, caste et al.
2. While it is the fundamental
right of the citizen “to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit
of inquiry and reform” –
a) The State had
failed its Hindus to rein in the caste panchayats that tend to
lynch the inter-caste couples and
b) The politicians, who treat the
Musalmans as a vote-bank had neither
encouraged them to inculcate the spirit of inquiry nor provided them an
environment conducive for reform.
Whatever, owing to the vacuity of
verbiage in the over the 100k word-long Indian Constitution, a rabid Islamic
obscurantist and a dyed-in-the-wool Hindu nationalist have been able to pin
their juxtaposing positions, with equal aplomb, and that’s ironical. However,
while the Hindu secular habit of left-lib brainwash would like to equivocate
the Jai Sriram chants with the Musalman rant of Allah Hu Akbar, one needs to understand the latter in the context
of azan, the muezzins’ five-time a day call to the
faithful for Islamic prayers, which reads thus:
“Allah is the Greatest,
I bear witness that there is none worthy of
worship except Allah,
I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger
of Allah,
Come to Prayer,
Come to success.
Allah is the Greatest
There is none worthy of worship except Allah.”
It is thus, Hindus, Christians,
Buddhists, Sikhs et al of India, and of the world, have to endure the azan, blaring
from the loudspeakers of their neighborhood mosques five times day,
which, besides offending their own belief-system is bound to hurt their
religious sentiments. But no one is seemingly caring, not even the evolved
Christian West.
That is not all, wonder how the inimical quranic tirades of the Musalmans
against kafirs in mosques, madrasas and mohallas reconcile with their FUNDAMENTAL DUTIES as Indian citizens that are
stipulated in the Indian Constitution, as under, is anybody’s guess.
“PART IVA , 51A. It shall be the duty of every citizen
of India
(e) to promote harmony and the spirit of common
brotherhood amongst all the people of India transcending religious, linguistic
and regional or sectional diversities; to renounce practices derogatory to the
dignity of women.”
Also, the Christian proselytizers as Indian citizenry
fare no better in their constitutional compliance for besides branding Hindus
as heathens, they label their deities as false.
Needless to say, the copy (from other constitutions)
and paste (in the Indian Constitution) work of the so-called framers of our
constitution, comprising of the Semitic-naïve caste Hindus and a well-informed,
though embittered dalit, as argued
above, needs a pragmatic overhaul, for which the level of Hindu awareness about
the Abrahamic outrage against their sanātana dharma has to raise
to self-respecting heights of Himalayan proportions, hopefully.
So, it is time
for WE THE PEOPLE OF INDIA, over seventy years after our fathers, or be it
grandfathers, had adopted the constitution, to factor the new realities into a
more equitable document? After all, isn’t the level playing field the theme
song of the modern world order? And the Hindu emotional grievance is that they
are denied just that in the religious plane in the country that their forbears
made their own before all others.
[This is part
of the author’s Puppets of Faith: Theory of Strife (A Critical Appraisal of
Islamic Faith, Indian Polity ‘n More) that’s in the public domain as a free
ebook]
Labels: Indian Constitution, Indian democracy, Indian secularism, Minority rights, Muslim appeasement, Reight to religion, Religious conversions, Religious propagation
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