Opinion J Sai Deepak writes: Mind the civilisation gap

(b) “majoritarianism/Hindu majoritarianism” is increasingly being used to gaslight Hindus even in the context of constitutional and policy discussions without bearing the burden of demonstrating unconstitutionality;

(c) the relationship of the Hindu to this land is based on inseverable civilisational bonds, not numbers; and

(c) given the history of Bharat, a historically blinkered approach to constitutional morality would serve neither the cause of the civilisation nor the constitution.

In response to this piece, a counter authored by Rajshree Chandra (“PRC” for convenience) was published on June 27, 2023. In this piece, I respond to her counter (I assume the use of “she/her” isn’t presumptuous since no other pronoun has been suggested in the bio to her piece).

Before I proceed to deal with the counter, I noticed that the title of her article was different in the print and online versions. While the print version was titled “Majority will, not majoritarianism”, which reflected sobriety, the online version was crudely titled “J Sai Deepak is man-splaining and savarna-splaining. Majority will isn’t majoritarianism”. Based on my experience with this publication, I assume this was an editorial call, and not of the author. If so, perhaps it reflects the times we live in that even a publication such as this feels the need to resort to click-bait online journalism despite the seriousness of the discussion at hand. This criticism stands even if the title is a back-handed compliment of sorts to the attention that supposedly comes these days with the use of my name in the title. One would have expected better from The Express…

Coming to my response, PRC opens her argument with the opinion that my article does not do justice to my intellectual standing and falls short on reasoning, substance and “good faith”. While accepting the compliment on my standing, I will respond to her general observations, ad hominem charges, as well as the specific questions raised.

Among other things, I have been accused of man-splaining, savarna-splaining, of re-packaging Savarkar, of advancing majoritarianism and of using “gas to light fire” through fear-mongering. To my mind, the accusations of man-splaining and savarna-splaining are examples of argumentum ad hominem where somehow my gender and varna (varna not being the same as caste) are brought into the picture to hope to put me on the defensive and to undermine the legitimacy of my Hindutvaite worldview. How wonderfully Left, and therefore, unoriginal of PRC. The Left will decide for me whether I speak as a man or as a Savarna or as a practising Hindu, the Left will decide what constitutes Hindu identity and who are “good Hindus”, the Left will define majoritarianism and determine the conditions of its selective application, and the Left will also define Hindutva and determine its constituents. The only thing that’s left is to accuse me of misogyny for penning this piece in response, and that wouldn’t surprise me either.

First, when someone says that they wish to look for Hindu majoritarianism outside the state apparatus when asked to demonstrate unconstitutionality of a policy decision or a legislation, they admit they do not have a case of unconstitutionality, hence the resort to “Hindu majoritarianism” as a perpetually inchoate fallback.

Second, I find the man-splaining and savarna-splaining charges slavishly imported, juvenile and mildly amusing because neither trope holds water in the context of Hindutva given its Sangathan antecedents and broad appeal. I sincerely hope PRC does not wish to argue with a straight face that only Savarna men constitute the Hindutva base.

Third, while I aired my position as a practising Hindu, the Constitution does not disenfranchise either men or Savarnas or Savarna men from exercising their right to express their views. Perhaps that is what offends PRC. Is it then possible to distil from her counter an inherited colonial hatred for an entire class of people, namely the so-called Savarnas? After all, the attempt of the Christian colonial establishment for close to two centuries was to balkanise the Hindu identity on manufactured “caste”, gender, racial and linguistic lines, whose effects continue since the Left has very ably taken over from the Christian European coloniser to push the very same anti-Hindu agenda. The freedom Movement too was sought to be delegitimised by the coloniser by identifying the “Chitpavan Brahmin” in Tilak, and pitting “Brahminical” Tilak and Annie Besant’s Home Rule Movement against the so-called “indigenous” Dravidian Movement in the then Madras Presidency. This was no different from the Christian European project of colonising and proselytising entire continents through genocidal means or by inventing ethnic fissures in native populations.

Now I assume PRC is comfortable hurling the “manuvadi” jibe at “people like me” given her predictable use of man-splaining and savarna-splaining to characterise my position. If so, will she admit to the documented scriptural motivation for the European colonisation project? Is she unaware of it, or is it too inconvenient to bring up? Or is it her case that the coloniser who converted or massacred entire populations in Africa, America and Australia driven by his ethno-religious supremacism suddenly grew a conscience when he set foot on the sacred soil of Bharat? For someone who sees Hindu majoritarianism on the street and everywhere, does PRC not see the continued impact of evangelical expansionism in the ongoing conflict in the Northeast which was intended to be carved out as a crown colony? With growing conversions to Christianity in Punjab, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu due to unchecked, rampant and fraudulent evangelical activity, what part of “dwindling numerical majority” status of Hindus (which constitutionally includes Sikhs) is a lie?

As a professor of political science, is she going to make the facile argument that there was neither correlation nor causality between the demographic composition of undivided Punjab (over 55 percent Muslim), Bengal (over 54 percent Muslim) and NWFP (over 91 percent Muslim), and the partition of Bharat on religious lines, and the ongoing creation of lebensräume in Assam, Tripura and Bengal? Does she not see majoritarianism in the treatment meted out to Hindus in Kashmir, the Northeast, parts of Bengal, Malappuram and Wayanad to name a few places? Does historical continuum in her worldview apply only to “caste structures” and “patriarchal power structures” in relation to the Hindu fold and nowhere else? If no, what part of my argument on the intolerant nature of organised, expansionist, monotheistic worldviews was fear-mongering, unreasonable and in bad faith? Would PRC have made such an insensitive argument in relation to any other victim population in Africa or “Latin America”? Any person with a conscience would introspect. But I guess that is too much to expect from a mindset that sees a community in the victim if the victim is a non-Hindu, and an individual from the majority community when the victim is a Hindu. I hope PRC doesn’t predictably call this “whataboutery”, because this isn’t whataboutery, but is calling out hypocrisy.

In any case, I don’t need to quote or repackage Savarkar in support of my position because Hindutva is not his brainchild nor do I completely agree with Savarkar in all respects. I can equally cite Shri Aurobindo or Rabindranath Tagore or even Ambedkar for their views on the expansionist nature of organised and proselytising monotheistic worldviews. Not so surprisingly, contemporary Ambedkarites who often quote his views on Hinduism to spew venom at it, conveniently ignore his views on Islam and on the two-nation theory. They also forget the treatment meted out to another Dalit, Jogendranath Mandal, the first Minister of Law and Justice of Muslim-majority Pakistan, who resigned from his post in the aftermath of mass atrocities committed against Dalits and non-Muslim minorities in “the land of the pure”, and returned a broken man to Bharat in 1950 to work for Hindu refugees from Bangladesh.

As for PRC’s concern for Dalits and women, it would help to jog her memory to hold the Left to account for the CPI(M)-orchestrated Marichjhapi Massacre of 1979 in Jyoti Basu’s West Bengal since most of the victims were namashudras (Dalits), women and children, all refugees from Muslim-majority Bangladesh. Perhaps to atone for this sin, in the 20th Congress of the CPI(M) held in April 2012 in Kozhikode, PRC’s ideological co-travelers adopted the resolution titled “For Rights of Bengali Refugees”, which evasively mentioned the plight of namashudras as “victims of historical circumstances” and called for amendment of the Citizenship Act in favour of “Bangladesh minority community refugees”. Shamefully, her comrades could not even get themselves to utter the word “Hindus” when referring to the refugees. Cut to 2019, the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 suddenly became the tool of “Hindu majoritarianism” as PRC too claims in her article. Clearly, the Left has been trained in intellectual acrobatics by a team of Olympians from Soviet Russia.

Coming to her query about my “approval ratings” for the Section 377 judgement, the Sabarimala verdict of 2018, the Ayodhya Verdict, the J&K delimitation verdict and the Hindutva Judgement:

First, perhaps she should dig up a bit more and check as to which religious organisations formally opposed decriminalisation of homosexuality in the Supreme Court. Hint: “Trust God Ministries”. Also, Hindutva accommodates even non-binary gender identities to which there are dedicated religious institutions within the Hindu fold, unlike monotheistic and organised worldviews which prescribe death or condemn them to hell. PRC would do well to read up on the contributions of SOGIESC Hindu scholar Gopishankar Madurai in this regard before mischievously laying homophobia at the doors of Hinduism or Hindutva.

Second, at least the facts relating to the practice of the Sabarimala Temple should not have been misrepresented by a professor of political science. The Temple was never closed to women per se. Even the Supreme Court did not characterise it the way PRC has. So much for nuance. The Temple is dedicated to a celibate deity whose vows inform the traditions and practices of the Temple, just as there are institutions dedicated to female deities in the very same state, namely Kerala, and elsewhere which impose restrictions on men. Obviously, the diversity of the Hindu faith cannot be understood by the Left, which shares the monochromatism of organised monotheistic worldviews.

Pertinently, the enlightened Hindu women of Kerala and the world over launched the “Ready to Wait” campaign cutting across varna and social lines to vocally oppose the original negative verdict of the Supreme Court and Lutyens-driven mischaracterisation of the Temple. It’s not surprising that their views are inconvenient to the mindset PRC represents. After all, it is convenient to cite the literacy rate of Kerala and the progressive nature of its society when maliciously pitting the “Kerala Model” against the “Gujarat Model”, but the opposition the Supreme Court’s original negative verdict received from enlightened Hindu women of the very same state is an inconvenient reality. In fact, they challenged the verdict in dozens of review petitions which led to a reference to a larger Bench on November 14, 2019, and questions were framed by the Apex Court on the constitutional limits of secular rationality in the domain of faith and religious institutions. But for such opposition, what would have been the fate of the Temple and the rights of the devout?

Third, on the face of it, the Ayodhya verdict upholds the position of Ram Janmabhoomi but also contains ten inexplicable paragraphs in defence of the Places of Worship Act (PoW) of 1991 which had nothing to do with the Ayodhya dispute. I have authored at least two pieces explaining in detail these problematic paragraphs of the Ayodhya Judgment contending that they appear to have been included for one reason — to prevent a future challenge to the PoW Act, thereby denying Hindus the right to reclaim not just Kashi and Mathura but thousands of other occupied Hindu Holy sites in exercise of their rights under Articles 25, 26 and 29. Is PRC aware of this important factual nugget or do details and nuance not matter to her? In any case, the legal dispute relating to Ayodhya commenced in the 19th century and was put to bed in the 21st century in a dwindling Hindu-majority country, while there are still thousands of occupied Hindu sites whose reclamation is barred by the PoW Act of 1991. So much for Hindu majoritarianism. If December 6, 1992 is going to be cited in this regard with respect to the erstwhile disputed structure at Ayodhya, it would help to equally cite the hundreds of Hindu temples destroyed before and after 1992 in Kashmir and elsewhere in independent Bharat.

Fourth, while PRC has name dropped the J&K delimitation judgment and the Hindutva judgment, the former was on the question of the Union’s power of delimitation in relation to redrawing of a legislative assembly, whereas the latter was on the distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva in the context of their use in an electoral setting. Neither is relevant to the discussion at hand.

I assume the reversal of the Shah Bano judgment of the Supreme Court by the Rajiv Gandhi-led majority government did not occur to PRC as an example of majoritarianism. Nor in seeking my approval ratings, did she mention the Supreme Court’s dismissal, first in July 2017 and again in December 2022, of the petition filed by Kashmiri Pandits seeking an SIT probe into the State-sponsored genocidal atrocities committed against them in 1989-90, which led to a forced internal displacement of members of the Hindu civilisation from the land of their ancestors. But I understand. It’s convenient to conflate a civilisational position with the BJP’s position to delegitimise the former instead of addressing real, genuine and existential Hindu civilisational concerns. It works well for the Left (and others) to project the BJP as the sole guardian of Hindu interests and dismiss all apolitical concerns as “saffron propaganda”. That common Hindus do have concerns and interests which are independent of the BJP is yet another inconvenient reality.

Before PRC loses sight of the forest for the trees, let me clarify and break it down for her. Civilisational awareness is neither amorphous nor hazy. But if it is, the shifting sands of constitutional morality are no better if its conveniently vague contours and the track record of its application are anything to go by. And between the two, civilisational awareness has a stronger basis in history, which should have been evident to a professor of political science. In any case, I did not argue against constitutional morality, I only sought for inclusion of civilisational awareness in the calculus of constitutional morality.

As for “civilisational morality” which PRC derides, I am rather surprised at the conflation of civilisational awareness with civilisational morality, that too by an academic, since I used the former in my piece, not the latter. Someone wasn’t paying attention. However, since she has raised the issue, she might want to know that in every country public morality (a concept expressly recognised by the Constitution) is inevitably drawn from the ethos of the society and in the case of Bharat, from its Dharmic civilisational ethos. No wonder we did not need a constitution or international conventions to provide refuge to persecuted Parsis or Jews — both victims of organised monotheistic belligerence which PRC questions. Nor did we have the Constitution of 1950 when the Temple Entry Movement was launched, and we certainly did not have a constitution when the society produced Rani Durgavati or Ahilya Bai Holkar or Kittur Chennamma or Sree Narayana Guru. So yes, pro-Dharma minorities, women and Dalits are very much part of the Hindutvaite worldview as equal stakeholders.

The writer is a commercial and constitutional litigator who practises as a counsel before the Supreme Court of India, the High Court of Delhi, the NCLAT and the CCI. He is the author of the bestsellers, India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution, and India, Bharat and Pakistan: The Constitutional Journey of a Sandwiched Civilisation.