Basic Structure of the Indian Constitution - The Case of a Square Peg in the Round Hole

When Hindustan was partitioned on the basis of the Hindu-Muslim religious divide, pragmatism would have demanded, as proposed by Dr. BR Ambedkar, the latter-day architect of the Indian Constitution, to affect population exchange on communal lines between the successor countries, India and Pakistan. More so, as Ambedkar backed his proposition with the exposition of the Islamic ethos and the Muslim psyche thus: “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.”

However, the largely Islamapoloic Hindu leadership at that critical juncture of its newfound freedom not only paid a deaf ear to Ambedkar’s Islamic warnings but also let Nehru the numero uno to bend over backwards to ensure that the bulk of the Muslims staid put in India to buttress its secular image. And sadly by the time Ambedkar sat down to formulate India’s Constitution, he himself had paid no heed to his own forebodings for he granted freedom to propagate religion as Indians’ fundamental right in its Part III – 25 thus: “Freedom of conscience and free profession, practice and propagation of religion - 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”, which the Supreme Court later inferred as its inviolable Basic Structure.

Unfortunately for Bharat that is India, Nehru, who characterized himself as ‘English by education, Muslim by culture and Hindu by accident’, had held sway over the Indian polity then, and it was as if he wanted to make Muslims feel more at home in India than even in Pakistan their New Holy Land. What is worse, such was his hold over the psyche of the overwhelming Hindu majority that he succeeded in building a national narrative that in Muslim pleasing lay the soul of Indian secularism. However, it is seldom appreciated that whereas the Hindu sanatana dharma is of a social construct that is amenable for evolution, the Semitic social connect, more so of the Islamic kind, based on religious bond is made rigid by unwavering faith. So, while the right to practice religion enabled the dalit Hindus to gain entry into the thereto out of reach temples, the right to propagate their faith gave the legal protection to the Muslims and the Christians alike to poach into the tenuous Hindu religious arena of the tribal people and the scheduled castes. It’s thus, owing to the suicidal freedom of religious propagation, demographically speaking that is, the 9% or so of the post-partition India’s Muslim population has since swelled to 18% or more and if the harvest of around 10% crypto-Christian souls is accounted for, one can get the picture of the perilous state of the Indian demography, which, given the exclusivist and supremacist credo of the Semitic faiths, if left unaddressed, could lead to another partition down the wretched line of the Indian history.

Hence, as Supreme Court’s Basic Structure surmise, the case of a square peg in the round hole, is nothing but a Doctrine of Division that is bound to undermine India’s post-partition integrity, hope that WE THE PEOPLE OF INDIA through our elected representatives would suitably amend the constitution meant for the Utopian Republic of India that is detrimental to our SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC before it is beyond redemption.