India’s Prime Minister Modi never misses an opportunity to attack the Indian National Congress Party (INC) and its phoney secularism. And rightly so, for doublespeak needs to be outed. Hindu-Muslim relations are far too important to be left to cant and hypocrisy; it could do with a new dawn.
###
The trouble is, Modi is the master of doublespeak; cherry- picking Nehru’s utterances to serve narrow partisan interests; half — truths muddy the water.
###
Nehru was not infallible, and the INC has much to answer for. Vote bank politics and Muslim appeasement needs to be called out, but much of what Modi says is incorrect; peddling half — truths is unconscionable. He revealed recently the INC’s sham concern for Muslims: He told the nation, that ex-Prime Minister Narasimha Rao had allegedly said ‘if the Muslims want to live in the gutter, so be it, it is not the job of the INC to reform them’. India was then in the throes of the Shah Bano Case and it was in this context that Rao mouthed these unacceptable words. Rao’s comments however are linked to a wider stream of orthodoxy and nativism.
###
###
This case was an inflection point in Hindu — Muslim relations and INC’s stand was shameful; it was classic phoney secularism. The litigation was about Muslim women’s fight for rights and it was a controversial maintenance lawsuit in which the Supreme Court of India, delivered a landmark judgement giving a divorced Muslim woman her rights to basic maintenance, available to non-Muslim women. Instead of lauding this progressive measure, the Rajiv Gandhi government brought in ‘The Muslim Women Act’, 1986, to overturn the judgement of the Supreme Court. This was done under pressure from the Muslim Ulema, who said that the judgement was in conflict with Sharia. This pivot gave rise to the feeling that the INC was anti-Hindu and would do almost anything to appease the Muslim clergy. Even at the expense of national interest. And the BJP grew from a party of two (in 1991) to become the hegemon (a party of over 300) that it is today. The Shah Bano case therefore needs to be discussed in a broader frame that includes the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) and the Muslim Personal Law. But more importantly the Hindu Code bill because much of the charge of phoney secularism starts here. And Modi had a larger purpose in quoting Rao’s shocking views.
###
What is the Hindu Code Bill?
###
Primarily it is a series of bills that attempts to codify and reform the Hindu Personal Law and covers, marriage, succession, and guardianship. It was introduced in the Constituent Assembly in August of 1947 and Nehru completed this codification around 1955-56. It was a long process that saw a vitriolic debate inside and outside Parliament. Some would call passing of these bills as Nehru’s crowning achievement, others as the first step of Muslim appeasement.
###
Who were the principal objectors to these reforms?
###
The RSS primarily and why did they object? Precisely for the very same reasons that the Muslim Ulema objected: old and antiquated religious practices take precedence over reason and common sense. The conservative elements in the Hindu Right were and are as retrograde as some Muslim Ulema in India. In fact the UCC was an omnibus reform to bring uniformity in codification of Indian laws for its citizens irrespective of their faith, but this ambitious overhaul was aborted and therein lies the rub. Nehru give up on his mission to usher in the uniform civil code (UCC), and instead decided to concentrate solely on the Hindu Code bill; his logic was, ‘let’s complete what we can’ (the Hindus constituted over 80% of the population) and attempt the UCC at a later date. This deferment is cited as clear evidence of Nehru’s appeasement mindset; central to this canard that he was somehow anti-Hindu.
###
– Ravi Menon###
The Hindu Right, of which Modi is a part, asks, why must only the Hindus be asked to reform? Why must we have different laws for its citizens? Fair question, but those who were the principal objectors to reforming their own archaic personal laws are the least qualified to debate this. In hindsight, Nehru should have pressed on with the uniform civil code but it was felt in the 1950s, the minorities needed time before this reform process was thrust upon them. It is legitimate however to ask, seventy years on, haven’t the country’s minorities had enough time to introspect and realise that they are on the wrong side of history?
###
Yes, unvarnished truths need unmasking but Modi’s repetition of the ‘gutter comment’ smacks of political gamesmanship. Minorities have to be persuaded to see reason and they deserve honest and wise interlocutors. The ‘Republic’ has seen too many false dawns in the last 70 years.
###
— Ravi Menon is a Dubai-based writer, working on a series of essays on India and on a public service initiative called India Talks.