Dear SC, What Exactly Is The Plan For Those Who Still Ask For Votes On Basis Of Religion, Caste?
Now that the Supreme Court has observed that asking votes for in the name of religion, race, caste, language is illegal, how are the citizens to know about the implementation of it?
Even as the Supreme Court delivered its verdict that no politician should use caste or religion in a secular polity in his or her election propaganda, one wonders what exactly it means at ground zero. We all witnessed how openly every 'secular' (read non-BJP) political party went ahead and supported the Patel agitation in Gujarat. The conscience of the Old Media establishment seems to wake up only when 'Hindutva' gets involved. Nevertheless, here, the question we have to ask is how the judgement would be implemented: whether it will be implemented in harmony with the spirit of the chief architect of the Indian Constitution?
Before going into that one, we should also note the fact that Hindutva or Hinduness is not a religion even in the remotest sense of the term. It is, for its adherents, the very essence of the existence of India. This has also been acknowledged in a symbolic way by the founding fathers of the Indian State. Thus the Indian Navy proudly displays the Vedic statement Sam no Varuna; the LIC logo carries these words from the Bhagavad Gita: Yogakshemam Vahamyaham; Satyam Sivam Sundaram is etched on the logo of the Doordarshan; NCERT logo contains a verse from Isavasya Upanishad. If we go by today's 'secular' statements, each one of these would be considered 'communal' or a 'blatant Hindutva' attempt to make the Indian state appear theocratic. If, for the sake of argument, LIC logo didn’t have the Gita verse on its logo, and the present government introduced it, we would have been entertained by countless hours of ridiculous media debates by anchors and other culturally illiterate elite branding the act as 'anti-secular'.
However, we know that the founding fathers of this nation, while rejecting the exclusiveness of any ideology, did consider a cultural nationalist essence for the nation. Today, the so-called secular forces have put themselves in a camp inimical to this cultural essence of Indian nationhood.
Dr B R Ambedkar, the prime architect of the Indian Constitution, on two separate occasions, had pointed out the threats to India's unity is through divisive polity. In his famous speech to the constituent assembly on 25 November 1949 he observed:
What perturbs me greatly is the fact that not only India has once before lost her independence, but she lost it by the infidelity and treachery of some of her own people.
In the invasion of Sindh by Mahommed-Bin-Kasim, the military commanders of King Dahar accepted bribes from the agents of Mahommed-Bin-Kasim and refused to fight on the side of their King. It was Jaichand who invited Mahommed Gohri to invade India and fight against Prithvi Raj and promised him the help of himself and the Solanki Kings. When Shivaji was fighting for the liberation of Hindus, the other Maratha noblemen and the Rajput Kings were fighting the battle on the side of Moghul Emperors. When the British were trying to destroy the Sikh Rulers, Gulab Singh, their principal commander sat silent and did not help to save the Sikh Kingdom. In 1857, when a large part of India had declared a war of independence against the British, the Sikhs stood and watched the event as silent spectators.
Will history repeat itself? It is this thought which fills me with anxiety. This anxiety is deepened by the realisation of the fact that in addition to our old enemies in the form of castes and creeds we are going to have many political parties with diverse and opposing political creeds. Will Indians place the country above their creed or will they place creed above country? I do not know. But this much is certain that if the parties place creed above country, our independence will be put in jeopardy a second time and probably be lost forever. This eventuality we must all resolutely guard against. We must be determined to defend our independence with the last drop of our blood.
Any 'secularist' of today would without doubt label the speech 'communal'. However what Dr Ambedkar says is clear. He defines here a historical essence of the nationhood, which needs to be guarded, placing it above all creeds and even political ideologies, leave alone caste. Dr Ambedkar revisited the same theme again in 1955 - just a year before his Parinirvan. This time in the case of linguistic states, Dr Ambedkar said with a rare anguish for the Hindus thus:
“If India and Pakistan had remained united in one State Hindus though independent would have been at the mercy of the Muslims. A merely independent India would not have been a free India from the point of view of the Hindus. It would have been a Government of one country by two nations and of these two the Muslims without question would have been the ruling race notwithstanding Hindu Mahasabha and Jana Sangh. When the partition took place I felt that God was willing to lift his curse and let India be one, great and prosperous. But I fear that the curse may fall again. For I find that those who are advocating linguistic States have at heart the ideal of making the regional language their official language.”
If one compares these two passages, separated by a period of six years in independent India, one can find that Dr Ambedkar was worried about Hindus being balkanised by caste, creed, language and political ideologies. The chief architect of Indian Constitution desired a political sanghathan of Hindus and his annihilation of caste was towards that end. The Hindu for him, in the broadest sense of the term, included Saivaite, Vaishnavaite, Brahmo, Arya Samajist, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain and all tribal traditions.
However if we take the strategies of the so-called secular parties, one will be able to see that they were playing Jaichand, Gulab Singh and those who sided with Aurangazeb as pointed out by Dr Ambedkar. Take for example the famous formula devised by Congress - the KHAM (Khastriya, Harijan, Adivasi and Muslim). It was an explicit attempt at vote bank politics. This actually fractured the social fabric and led to violence and riots. 'Secular' media openly writes during election times about specific caste vote banks and 'analyse' how they would swing in favour of which party and why. It is not only the election campaign alone, but the overall operation of the political parties as well as the media, which should be brought under scrutiny if the implementation of the judgement is to abide by the spirit of the makers of the Constitution.
This is a poster of a conference that was organised in the YMCA grounds in Chennai on 25 December 2016. It shows that all the leaders of political party, except the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), sharing a common platform against the Uniform Civil Code. The prominent leaders of two arch rival Dravidian parties, All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), two arch rival casteist parties, Paatali Makkal Katchi (PMK) and Vidudalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK), are featured as speakers. The poster also includes Indian National League, a Muslim political party, which had put up posters for the execution of gays, and has been an electoral ally of Communist Marxist Party in Kerala.
So here we have a perfect example of how caste and communalism can join hands, and in typical Orwellian fashion, can call blatant fundamentalist anti-secularism as secularism. It is this vicious pitfall of the perverted parlance of pseudo-secular politics that the Indian judicial system should take into consideration when it requires the state to implement its verdict.