Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Say Goodbye to Secularism

Indians are getting vexed by Secularism! They see it as an encumbrance; something they know is guaranteed in the Indian constitution but which they do not like to follow if possible. It is more akin to traffic rules of India, which most Indians would rather not follow though they exist as laws.

Now, a HC court judge has said that Indians should ‘follow dharma propounded by Bhagvad Gita’. He opined that Gita is a ‘dharma shastra’ of India. The court added that as India recognized National Flag and National Anthem, it should consider Bhagvad Gita as rashtriya dharma shastra.

This ruling is not just a freak episode and should not be seen as one. There are millions of Hindu Indians who would like to see such trends paving the way for a ‘Hindu Rashtra’. One commenter at CNN-IBN said that at least someone is speaking for the majority of this nation while politicians and the government is appeasing the minorities of India.

Secularism is becoming an extremely repugnant element of Indian Constitution. Many Indians abhor it. Hindus would like to completely abandon this charade of pretending to be secular which according to them is nothing more than ‘appeasement of minorities’ while ‘punishing the majority’. Muslims have never reconciled themselves to this. Always riding ‘special privileges’ where they continue to practice Islamic Law, depriving women of their rights, they would rather kick secularism out to just implement Shariat in its purest form.

11 comments:

  1. On 15 August 1996 the Indian tricolour was hoisted from the ramparts of Delhi's Red Fort in an annual ritual of state invented forty-nine years earlier by India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. The man who in 1996 presided over this ceremonial observance of the day India gained independence from British rule came from a world galactically removed from Nehru's. H. D. Deve Gowda had taken office a few months earlier, the first Indian prime minister to speak neither Hindi nor English. A self-proclaimed 'humble farmer's son' from the southern state of Karnataka, he had vowed to master Hindi in time for the traditional Independence-day address to the nation. He stepped to the rostrum and valiantly delivered his speech in halting, and sometimes comic Hindi. ('Given the fact,' explained one supportive newspaper, 'that Mr Deve Gowda's familiarity with Hindi is only a few months old his speech obviously lacked the rhetorical flourishes.') It was a talismanic moment in India's public life. The mighty Congress, the invincible juggernaut of India's twentieth-century history, the party so intimately associated with Nehru and his family, which had set the terms of an Indian identity, had crashed to electoral defeat in May. No ready substitute had emerged. The strongest challenger, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), representing a resurgent Hindu nationalism, had made unprecedented advances in the elections, and for a brief fortnight it had actually held office -- so interrupting India's record of government by non-religious parties. But, short of a majority, the BJP too had fallen, and power had passed to the men from the regions, a hastily arranged medley of more than a dozen parties led by the farmer from Karnataka, Deve Gowda.

    After almost fifty years of self-rule, the old certitudes of Indian politics had crumbled. Yet one powerful continuity stretched across this half-century of spectacular and often turbulent events: the presence of a democratic state. As a single territory commanded by a state, India has long posed something of a puzzle even: the British who had possessed it as an empire marvelled at its oddity. Macaulay, with characteristic but for once justifiable exaggeration, famously described it as 'the strangest of all political anomalies'. As an independent democratic state since 1947, India remains defiantly anomalous.

    Few states created after the end of European empire have been able to maintain democratic routines; and India's own past, as well as the contingencies of its unity, prepared it very poorly for democracy Huge, impoverished, crowded with cultural and religious distinctions, with a hierarchical social order almost deliberately designed to resist the idea of political equality, India had little prospective reason to expect it could operate as a democracy. Yet fifty years later India continues to have parliaments and courts of law, political parties and a free press, and elections for which hundreds of millions of voters turn out, as a result of which governments fall and are formed. Democracy is a type of government, a political regime of laws and institutions. But its imaginative potency rests in its promise to bring alien and powerful machines like the state under the control of human will, to enable a community of political equals before the constitutional law to make their own history. Like those other great democratic experiments inaugurated in eighteenth-century America and France, India became a democracy without really knowing how, why, or what it meant to be one. Yet the democratic idea has penetrated the Indian political imagination and has begun to corrode the authority of the social order and of a paternalist state. Democracy as a manner of seeing and acting upon the world is changing the relation of Indians to themselves.

    How did the idea arrive in India? And what has it done to India, and India to it?

    In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? - Baba Saheb

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  2. Sujai, if secularism is not embraced byboth the majority and the minority how then can it be a part of our constitution? After all, the constitution is supposed to reflect the aspirations/values that are close to the heart of the residents of a nation, right? If not secularism, what then is the way forward? Legal pluralism?
    ~ Vinod

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  3. Vinod:
    Sujai, if secularism is not embraced byboth the majority and the minority how then can it be a part of our constitution?

    Traffic laws and tax laws are not embraced by anyone in India and still it is a part of our system.

    After all, the constitution is supposed to reflect the aspirations/values that are close to the heart of the residents of a nation, right?

    Not really. If India was asked to vote on what kind of constitution it wanted, I don't think we would have had tax systems, and I don't think we would have traffic rules, and I don't think we would have had secularism.

    If not secularism, what then is the way forward? Legal pluralism?

    I would still go with secularism. I just hope we wake up soon to protect it.

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  4. Sujai: If India was asked to vote on what kind of constitution it wanted, I don't think we would have had tax systems, and I don't think we would have traffic rules,

    Sujai: Do we have traffic rules and tax system in our constitution? I googled and did not find any reference to these topics in Indian constitution. Need your help to understand - Appreciate it - Thanks - Darpan.

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  5. Sujai, any sane person in India can easily see the need for traffic laws though he may have moral weaknesses in adhering to them. Furthermore, laws and idealogy are different things and don't relate to people's aspirations in the same way. It would be very strange to talk of people's aspirations for traffic laws. The need for traffic laws is rather obvious to all and not disputed. I would be very surprised to see if people actually object to the existence of the basic traffic control systems - red, orange and green light. That is to be distinguished from the failure to adhere to the laws.

    Coming to secularism, there are many Indians who are idealogically opposed to it and would even go on to propose alternate idealogies. That is what I refer to as aspiration. Many commmunities may feel unjustly treated by the application of secular principles in the govt institutions. Such matters go the heart of people's aspirations.

    ~ Vinod

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  6. Vinod:
    My analogy is wrong as you pointed out.

    What I want to arrive at is that Indians - the masses, were not really clear what our constitution was till very late. By then it was already framed and given to us. I mean it was not democratically chosen document - and it is true for almost every country- few founding fathers hand it over to us and we just accept it.

    If not for the founding fathers, Indian upper caste masses would not have accepted reservations in any form.

    The idea that a Dalit would get the same privilege as that of a Rajah would have been anathema to most Indians.

    However, waking up to the implications of our constitution, we started to appreciate it or abhor it. It also resulted in many amendments.

    Interesting thing to note is that
    the words SECULAR and SOCIALIST were added into the Preamble in 1976 during Emergency.

    So, even though Nehru is considered SOCIALIST it was not a part of our Preamble, and though we consider our country secular, it was not a part of Preamble. However the basic core of constitution reflected these two ideologies in all its clauses.

    Should the constitution reflect the sentiments and aspirations of its people or should it reflect its institutions?

    ReplyDelete
  7. What I want to arrive at is that Indians - the masses, were not really clear what our constitution was till very late. By then it was already framed and given to us. I mean it was not democratically chosen document - and it is true for almost every country- few founding fathers hand it over to us and we just accept it.

    Are you saying that there should be x different versions of constitution and all citizens get to vote on which constitution they prefer and the one that gets most votes is adopted? Not sure that's how a democracy works. Do you mean we should have a similar system for all laws that are passed? Have a vote on them by all citizens? I hope you are aware how a parliamentary system of democracy functions.
    -Chirkut

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  8. Chirkut:
    I am not saying that.
    I am responding to Vinod. It is in a different context altogether.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Citizens do not get to vote on different versions of constitution. That will be too much for them to decide. They elect a constituent assembly and let it decide on their behalf. In case of Indian constitution also, the constituent assembly was elected by the people only, though through indirect representation.

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  10. He also warned India that the liberation of the erstwhile state of Hyderabad was also on the JuD's agenda.

    http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/pakistan/JuD-chief-Hafiz-Saeed-threatens-jehad-over-JK-/articleshow/5540016.cms

    Please understand, extreme left ATHEIST forces, along with Islamic fascists want to destroy Andhra Pradesh (includes Telangana).

    ReplyDelete
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