The Gloating At Others Discomfiture- New India
Last week there were two significant judgments delivered by the
supreme court of India. The first was on the constitutional validity of the
right to privacy where the judgment affirmed that right to privacy is a
fundamental right. And in the very same week the judges pronounced that
personal laws are no longer valid by striking down the triple talaq law under
Muslim personal law. Now the two may not seem related at first glance but lets
dig a little deeper to see what this means at ground level. In fact to digress
a bit there are those who are celebrating both the judgments without realizing
that they are both contradictory. The first one is an instance of executive
over reach being corrected by judicial over sight and the second one is an
example of judicial overreach (with the full connivance of a double-speaking
executive) which has used the judiciary as a stalking horse to achieve a
backhanded assault on personal laws and right to privacy.
Now disregarding the feminazis who will celebrate anything which
makes life harder for men (like easier divorces) and disregarding the usual
Muslim baiter's who will celebrate anything which will annoy or inconvenience
the average Muslim citizen of India, the real reason people should be afraid of
this judicial over reach is that based on this judgment any and every personal
or religious belief/freedom/personal law is open to censure by the courts and
government. I was so forcefully reminded of this by the Jallikattu movement a
few months back when a few offended animal rights activists invaded the
personal law space of Tamil pride and got jallikattu banned through the supreme
court. Now jallikattu might be a regressive practice in the eyes of a few
volunteers working with animals but does it give them the right to impose their
will on a million others under the garb of the court's orders? Invading
personal laws of various religions is pretty similar when you come to think of
it- tomorrow any person can state that they are offended by this or that
particular practice – say tying a mangalsutra on a woman’s neck (just for an
example) as a regressive practice under Hindu personal law and have the supreme
court ban it. Will it end there? There will be more and more invasion into the
personal laws of people based on the whims and fancies of whoever rules us or
based on lobbyists influence with the powers that be.
I remember reading somewhere that Sardar Vallabhai Patel warned
Nehru against meddling with Hindu personal laws as opening up a can of worms
and it’s taken us all these years to find out that the Sardar was bang-on right
and Nehru was wrong, as usual. That single instance of unwanted meddling with
hindu personal practices was the catalyst which fanned the flames of hindutva
renaissance all through these years and has atlast brought the current party to
power capitalizing on the hindu community’s feeling of being selectively targeted
by politicians which might or might not be true but you cant play with people’s emotions with
intellectual arguments based on the view from the lofty heights of Lutyen’s
Delhi or western mores.
If only Nehru had listened to the Sardar’s words and just declared
all personal laws as invalid from (or sacrosanct as the case may be) instead of
selectively targeting Hindu personal laws for reform we would not have seen
such communal polarizations and religious riots today in our country. The root
cause of all this evil lies solely there in the mists of forgotten history when
our first prime minister tried to reform Hindus from without instead of waiting
for them to reform from within. This left, in my opinion, a feeling of being sinned
against in the Hindus who instead of blaming the politicians (the Congress
collection of St.Stephens crowd) who had tried to pit one community against
another for their own narrow political needs instead took to venting their ire
on fellow sufferers like Muslims and Christians under the erroneous belief that
they enjoyed more religious freedoms that the Hindu’s were denied using the law
as a tool to bludgeon the Hindu community.
And the politicians succeed in driving a wedge between hitherto
peaceful communities for political gains and the same successful formula has
been used ever since by every mainstream political party to reap electoral
rewards while us citizens of India despite our religions and differences end up
being made fools of. Fools enough to not protest against executive or judicial
over reach even into the sanctity of our personal relationships leave alone
personal laws. And future generations will probably say the same thing about us
that we accuse them of- that we were mute spectators and applauded inwardly
(envy/hate – are two sides of the same coin), the judicial invasion of another
communities personal laws. Now nothing is personal anymore in our new India. And
we are all in danger of being legislated or judged out of our beliefs and ways
of existence which has stood the sanctity of time.
