By Justice Markandey Katju–
(Justice Markandey Katju is a former Judge, Supreme Court of India, and former Chairman, Press Council of India. The views expressed are his own)
For long, Indians boasted with pride that our country is secular, as proclaimed in the Constitution, and where religious minorities are equal citizens, while its neighbor Pakistan was theocratic, and where non-Muslim minorities lived in fear, and were often oppressed. That façade has crumbled, and Indian secularism has been exposed as a fig leaf.
This was so even before the right wing Hindu nationalist BJP came to power in 2014, and was just a ploy to get Muslim votes by the so called ‘secular’ parties.
Even before 2014, when the Congress was in power, Muslims in India were often oppressed and discriminated against, as the Justice Sachar Committee Report mentioned.
But, then, this was subtle, covert, occurring only sporadically, and kept in check with an eye on the large Muslim vote bank, particularly in north India. After 2014, it has become overt, aggressive, and continuous. Religious polarization is up steeply, promoted by the government. Incidents of lynching of Muslims for allegedly eating beef, beating them up for not saying ‘Jai Shri Ram’, bulldozing their houses, and other atrocities on them have often occurred. Since 80% of India’s population is Hindu, this has greatly benefited the BJP.
This trend has culminated in the ‘Pran Pratishtha’ ceremony in the recently constructed Ram Temple in Ayodhya on January 22 this year in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the ‘yajmaan’, standing beside Mohan Bhagwat, the head of the rabidly anti-minority RSS, which generated a wave of Hindu euphoria over large parts of India.
While still being a de jure secular country, India has, de facto, become a Hindu country.
Incidents are being reported in many places where Muslims are at the receiving end. Just as the shops of Jews and their places of worship were attacked after the Nazis came to power in 1933, something similar is happening to Muslims in India.
The Indian Constitution was promulgated in 1950 after India gained Independence in 1947. It largely borrowed from Constitutions of modern Western countries like the UK and the US, and had modern institutions like Parliament, an independent judiciary, a non-political bureaucracy, etc, and modern rights like liberty, equality and religious freedom.
At that time, India was still a largely feudal country, and it was believed by the Founding Fathers that this modern Constitution would pull up Indian society from its feudal state into the modern age.
However, a Constitution is just a piece of paper, and what matters are ground realities. India has gone back into the middle ages.
No doubt it is often said that the Indian economy is growing, but here is the reality, as I have been recording in these pages for a long time:
- The truth behind India’s explosive growth
- There are two Indias within India
- Lies, damned lies and statistics in India
Dark days have indeed come to India.
