Equal rights for Hindus: one year later
(IndiaFacts, 21 September 2020)
One year ago on Autumnal Equinox, 21 September 2019,
Hindus organized a conference in Delhi devoted to the discriminations against
the Hindus in the Constitution, and, on this bedrock, also extant in India’s laws
and effective policies. This was not a Sangh initiative (though VHP leader Alok
Kumar was present and being honoured), rather it had been called to formulate
demands addressed to the Sanghi governing party. Formally, it was the work
of an ad hoc grouping, the Hindu Charter (www.hinducharter.org).
Some discriminations are rather academic and only
consequential at several removes. Thus, the understanding of religious freedom
as guaranteed in article 25, especially the inclusion of the right to propagate
one's religion and thus to encourage others to convert, is tailor-made for the
Christian mission. This interest group had successfully lobbied to ensure that
the right to convert be included in the Constitution. It also fits the Islamic
design to islamize all of mankind, but the notion of conversion is foreign to
Hindus and even more to Parsis. So the constitutional right to convert
seemingly creates a level playing field, counting for all religions, yet in
practice it upholds a right central to Christianity and Islam but meaningless
(except negatively) to Hinduism. It legalizes the aggression by the foreign and
conquering religions to the detriment of the indigenous religion.
At the initiative of the Scheduled Tribes, targets par
excellence of the missionary efforts, several Indian states have enacted laws
against forcible or fraudulent conversion (which according to the missionaries
and their secularist allies are non-existent anyway). But these state laws can
never acquire teeth as long as the Constitution guarantees the right to
propagate religion. Thanks to this unshakable guarantee, the missionary
apparatus considers these anti-conversion laws as but an impotent scarecrow,
useful only to underpin its own internationally propagated image of hapless
victims being persecuted by an overbearing Hindu majority.
Education
The most consequential and effective discrimination is
comprised in article 30. It guarantees *to the minorities* (leaving the
majority unmentioned) the right to found and manage educational institutions.
This means that Hindu schools can be nationalized or subjected to other
government controls from which minority schools are exempt. In application of
this discrimination, the Right to Education Act, enacted by the
Congress-Communist combine in 2008, imposes a back-breaking burden on Hindu
schools (putting hundreds out of business) from which it exempts minority
schools.
But before this too, the discrimination was already
palpable. Thus, in the 1980s the Ramakrishna Mission's schools in West Bengal
were harassed by the Communist teachers' unions and threatened with
nationalization. Instead of appealing to Hindu society to come to its rescue,
instead of challenging the discriminatory rules which made this hostile
takeover possible, it dishonourably decided to abandon Hindu society and
desolidarize itself from all other Hindu sects that invest in schooling.
Instead it approached the Court to get itself recognized as a non-Hindu
minority, exemplifying the scramble for the exit from Hinduism.
The RK Mission failed in its attempt at
dehinduization, as had happened before already to the Sri Aurobindo Society:
the Court had to admit that the respective founders, Swami Vivekananda and Sri
Aurobindo, had explicitated that they were Hindu and had never intended to
found a new religion. But the Arya Samaj at the Panjab state level, the Jains
and the Lingayats did succeed in getting recognition as a non-Hindu minority
religion.
Point is that article 30 is a constant invitation to
the Hindu sects to leave Hinduism. It tends to fragment Hindu society. Apart
from the sheer injustice of this anti-Hindu discrimination, its power to
trigger the fragmentation of Hindu society should be reason enough for
pro-Hindu activists to do something about it. It also helps to confirm the
state's right to interfere in other fields of Hindu life, especially the places
of worship, again unlike the minorities' inviolable churches and mosques.
These two areas, education and places of worship, are
extremely important in today's world. In centuries past, children became Hindu
by spontaneously absorbing the religion and culture because these were all
around them. That is much less the case today. By contrast, formal schooling is
far more important than ever before. Keep the teaching of Hinduism out of the
schools (a requirement of enforcing "secularism", but only on the
Hindus), and it will enter the children's minds less and less. Unknown makes
unloved, and it makes Hindus unable to defend the choice for Hinduism to others
and even to themselves. This way, they become easy prey for whomever wants to
seduce them into abandoning their ancestral religion and entering other
worldviews and ways of life. For Hinduism, removing these discriminations is a
matter of life and death.
Abolition
The conference a year ago resolved to try and
influence the government into finally taking up the problem of this
Constitutional inequality. But it can be doubted whether anyone except the
participants has even heard of it. For the Government's policies, it has at any
rate not made any difference. In 2018 there was a Private Bill by BJP MP
Satyapal Singh, but both the party and the Government refused to take it up.
If the BJP and Narendra Modi had cared about Hinduism,
they would have prepared the correct parliamentary procedures before acceding
to power, and set to work in 2014 itself. Failing that, they could have come to
their senses in a next phase, and belatedly set to work anyway. Instead, while
they may have done their job on the development front, they remained
emphatically passive on the "communal" front. Many in there are just
time-servers satisfied with enjoying the perks of being in government.
The slightly more principled types, of RSS provenance,
had absorbed so much of secularist thought that the idea of recognizing and
abolishing anti-Hindu discriminations that were strangling Hindu life, just
didn't even occur to them. Instead, they take pride in outdoing Congress in
minority appeasement, having replaced Hindutva with "BJP secularism"
as their ideological backbone. Even independent activist Hindus tend to get
carried away by minor issues and muster no more than fleeting attention to the
main issue.
The problem here is that Hindus are suckers for
tokenism. With superficial gestures, wearing Hindu clothes and getting filmed
visiting a temple here and there, BJP ministers can assure themselves of Hindu
votes. A child's hand is easy to fill, and Hindus will gladly believe that only
economic issues are "the real issues", while the reforms that would
make a difference to the life and future of Hinduism are but "boutique
issues" (to borrow the term that a Hindu actually used).
When put on the spot, BJP devotees defend the BJP's
actual performance against the ideals to which they were once committed, like
"justice for all, appeasement of none". They insist that the leaders
"need time": even after more than 6 years in power, without
discerning any BJP intention to stray from the Nehruvian path of minority
appeasement (for that is what maintaining the anti-Hindu discrimination amounts
to), many are still not ashamed to say this, all while consistently remaining
passive on the issues for which they supposedly needed that time.
What to do
If you want to achieve any goal, you have an interest
in being coldly realistic. Let us face the fact that there is very little
commitment among even activist Hindus to abolish these discriminations. This is
an instance of a situation with which leaders ought to be familiar. Some
policies have popular appeal, but other policies, though the best-informed and
most prescient leaders see how necessary they are, just don't ring a bell among
the people. Yet, if a leader explains the need for abolishing these
discriminations, every parliamentarian of the BJP (and many others too) will
fall in line. Many don't think it is a priority, some had never thought about
it, but no one will object to it.
This is all the more true because abolishing the
Constitutional inequality between Hindus and non-Hindus is not hard to do. First
of all, it may not even be necessary to amend the Constitution, possibly it is
enough to approach the Supreme Court for an authoritative opinion. The judges
may point out that the Constituent Assembly could not have meant to deny to
Hindus the rights they were giving to the minorities. At that time, the Muslims
and Christians were on the defensive, acutely feeling how that were deemed
guilty of the Partition massacres c.q. the just-concluded colonial
exploitation. The Hindu members had no reason at all to enact discriminations
against themselves.
Secondly, if amending the Constitution still proves
necessary, this need not be insurmountable. Many opposition MPs may supports
reforms amounting to more equality. Congress and other parties still have their
eyes on the Hindu vote-bank: maybe they never would have taken the initiative
for this reform, but they will hesitate to oppose it once it is there. And with
the thumping majority that it has, the BJP needs very few votes from outside.
What a luxury, you’ll miss it when it’s gone.
The normalization of the Kashmir situation was harder,
needing lots of security precautions and triggering many negative reactions
from the usual suspects. But the BJP was ready to take these challenges on,
partly because it was a safely secular issue. Everybody knows the separate
status of Kashmir was due to its character as a Muslim-majority state, yet the
relevant laws didn't mention religion. It could be framed in terms of national
unity, a discourse in which the RSS-BJP is more at home than in anything
pertaining to Hindu aspirations.
Once religion comes into the picture, the going gets
tougher. This was clear from the CAA controversy earlier this year, about the
welcome to be given to the non-Muslims oppressed in Bangladesh, Pakistan and
Afghanistan. Here, the enemy had it easy to deduce his allegations of BJP
fanaticism from the obvious *inequality* between the religions in the CAA. This
inequality between oppressed communities and oppressor community had its
justification, but the mere mention of inequality counted as criminal to most
outside observers. The episode ended as a publicity failure, a loss of face for
the BJP government.
Well, here you don't have to accept the burden of a
word that triggers negative knee-jerk reactions. Here you don't have to justify
inequality, only to advertise equality. Who could be against equality?
That the Constitution discriminates against Hinduism,
and that this has large-scale consequences for the transmission of Hinduism to
the next generation, is one of India's better-kept secrets. Most academics
suppress this information and pretend loudly that India is a secular state,
i.e. a state with equality of all citizens before the law. It is not, and the
good implication is that for secularists it will be hard to object to a reform
that would turn India into a secular state, one in which no religion is
discriminated against.
But
Of course, the secularists are going to resist this
normalization of India's interreligious relations. They will for the first time
be put in a position of openly having to defend inequality, but some will find
a way of stooping that low without getting a bad conscience. Thus, some will
say that in order to achieve equality, a little bit of inequality is necessary.
That is the principle behind America's "affirmative action".
So they will claim (and we already have heard some
professors, when pressed to pronounce on this, affirm it) that as a majority,
the Hindus owe the minorities something. But in a secular state, there is no
such thing as a minority, there are only equal citizens. To insist nonetheless
on this point, they will allege that the American white majority has kept the
black minority as slaves, ergo majorities commit injustice against minorities
(an unjustified generalization), ergo in India too the majority has oppressed
the minorities.
Well, we have news for them: no, the Hindus have never
oppressed the Christians nor the Muslims. The reverse, yes. So if inequality
can be justified as a compensation for past injustice, then it is the
Christians and Muslims who have to pay compensation.
But we should not go that far. For the present and
future, simple equality will do.
Conclusion
The achievement of equality is not the end. Once the
state has created a level playing field, civil society has the task of using
the opportunities that arise. Hindus will have to take initiatives. A religion
that relies on state patronage will become weak.
Hindus should not want (and fortunately, by and large
don't want) to replace a system discriminating against them by a system where
they can discriminate against others. Just equality will do, and then let the
best worldview and way of life win. But that very limited goal of equality is
really necessary, and now becoming urgent.
After 2019 even more than before, BJP devotees smugly
assume that they are natural election-winners, so that they can safely postpone
any jobs till next term. Right now the opposition is in relative disarray and
not in a position to win against the BJP. But this can change. One of my
farthest memories about Indian politics concerns the accession to power of the
Janata Party, prepared by Jayaprakash Narayan's mass campaign that galvanized
the opposition against the seemingly invincible Indira Gandhi. In the coming
years too, we might see the rise of a leader type who manages to unite and
motivate the opposition.
If the BJP loses power, many Hindus will rue the
missed opportunities. What are the chances that an avowedly secularist
government will care about justice for Hinduism and take the initiative to
revise articles 25-30? Crying and gnashing of teeth, that is what many Hindus
will feel when they realize that the seemingly timeless window of opportunity
has passed, and that an ever-shrinking Hindu society has little chance of ever
bringing it back.
But it need not come that far. You still have more
than three years to get the job taken up and finished. What have you done to
persuade the BJP leadership to use the unique window of opportunity that still
presents itself?
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