Psyche of the Hindu State
While Trump’s tariff bombshells preoccupied the world, New Delhi’s Hindu nationalist government was launching a fresh strike on India’s Muslim minority. Prime Minister Modi’s government enacted a law to control “Waqf” properties, the phrase for the common lands and buildings of India’s Muslim communities, which are largely used for mosques, tombs, graveyards, orphanages, and schools. By narrow majorities, the two houses of India’s parliament passed the new law, which a unified opposition denounced as an unconstitutional attack on the Muslim minority and its rights.
Before, however, saying more about what this law means, let me welcome a couple of positive developments. The first is an excellent verdict by a bench of India’s Supreme Court, pronounced on April 8, that protects democratic functioning in the country as well as its federal structure, both greatly undermined in recent years.
Justices J. B. Pardiwala and R. Mahadevan ruled that governor R. N. Ravi of Tamil Nadu, appointed by Modi to his largely ceremonial office, was obliged to send to India’s president, for his formal assent, the ten bills passed by Tamil Nadu’s elected legislature on which Ravi had sat for many months or more. Some bills had been awaiting the governor’s signature since January 2020. Ravi should have forwarded them to the president long ago, said the justices. The bills should now become law.
VERDICT TO CELEBRATE
Tamil Nadu’s chief minister, M. K. Stalin, is a key player in the opposition India Alliance that wants India to remain a secular state where people of any or no religion can enjoy equal rights. This alliance opposes the drive, well under way, to turn India into a “Hindu state” analogous to our world’s “Islamic states.” Stalin has correctly hailed the top court’s verdict as a victory for India’s defenders of democracy and federalism.
The victory is both rare and significant. “Tamil Nadu has obtained a historic verdict,” Stalin told Tamil Nadu’s legislators, who thumped their desks. “This verdict is a victory not just for Tamil Nadu but all state governments in India,” added Stalin. He recalled how the governor had procrastinated when the bills were sent back to him after being passed by the assembly for the second time. Stalin said that Ravi had then claimed that he was well within his rights to refuse assent to the bills even when the Constitution made it clear that the governor had no option but to give his consent to bills sent back to him.
“It was against these actions of the governor that our government filed a case in the Supreme Court,” Stalin said. “Tamil Nadu has waged a legal battle to uphold the DMK’s core philosophy of autonomy for the state and federalism at the Centre. We will continue this fight and Tamil Nadu will win,” he added.
In a post on X, Stalin wrote: “We thank and welcome today’s historic judgment of the Hon’ble Supreme Court, reaffirming the legislative rights of State Legislatures and putting an end to the trend of Union government-nominated Governors stalling progressive legislative reforms in Opposition-ruled States. This is another crucial step in restoring balance in Union-State relations and a landmark victory in Tamil Nadu’s continuous struggle to usher in a truly federal India.”
We might mark that one of these bills sought to strengthen the state government’s role in the appointment of university chiefs in Tamil Nadu and make it harder for New Delhi to foist its nominees.
BRAVE HONESTY
The second development I am welcoming here does not affect India’s legal or political realities. But it is noteworthy. Rajdeep Sardesai is one of India’s best known television anchors. Millions watch and hear him on India Today’s popular TV channel, where Sardesai recites and explains the day’s news. He is seasoned, hardworking, and looked up to. As every journalist must be, Sardesai is careful too. On April 6 he did something he doesn’t normally do. Using the platform of his personal website, Sardesai gave a candid description of what it means to be a Muslim in the “new” India.
This new India has not been hospitable to frankness. India’s TV channels outdo one another in loud justifications for Hindu control. Thank you, Rajdeep, for your brave honesty.
Let me return to the new Waqf law. It has been called a weapon for grabbing Muslim land. The cumulative result of irrevocable donations by Muslims in previous centuries and recent decades, Waqf lands are administered in each state by a board and overseen by a central Waqf council. Passed in the name of “transparency and fairness in Waqf administration,” the new law contains clauses whereby control over these properties could pass into non-Muslim hands. India’s laws for regulating “religious” properties do not offer scope for roles by non-Hindus in managing a Hindu temple’s lands. People who are not Sikh cannot be named to a committee controlling a gurudwara’s site. Non-Christians cannot influence the running of church properties. Yet it appears that the new Waqf law could enable government-nominated non-Muslims to run the religious properties of Muslims.
BEHIND THE BLOWS
What lies behind the drive in India to “put Muslims in their place”? It is well known that India’s Muslims are underrepresented in virtually every arena, including legislatures, the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the police, the military, and universities. However, pushing them down seems to satisfy a craving to correct history’s “injustice”, for Muslims did rule over much or all of India from the 12th to the 18th century, an India where Hindus have always comprised the preponderant majority.
This reality is deeply humiliating today for some of India’s Hindus who for excellent reasons are proud of Hindu thought and Hindu talent, currently visible in almost every corner of the globe. The humiliation goes the deeper because the high-caste Hindu learns from infancy that she or he has been born into a privileged if not unique clan or caste. The memory that others a good deal less fortunate in their blood, i.e., Muslims with origins in Central Asia or the Middle East, or Christians from Britain, managed to rule India for eight continuous centuries, from the 12th to the 20th, is a pain that seems to find relief in hurting today’s Muslims.
Abbe Jean-Antoine Dubois (1765-1848), a French priest who spent four decades in southern India at a time when Muslim chiefs were prominent there and elsewhere in the country, wrote of the sense of superiority he found in the Hindus amidst whom he lived. While they had lost wars to outsiders, Hindus had “always,” wrote Dubois, “considered themselves infinitely their superior in the matter of civilization”. Added Dubois in his book, Hindu Manners & Customs:
“Being fully persuaded of the superlative merits of their own manners and customs, the Hindus think those of other people barbarous and detestable… This... pride [has] been so deeply ingrained in them that not one of the great dynastic changes that have taken place in India in modern times has been able to effect the smallest change in their mode of thinking and acting…
“[C]enturies of Mahomedan rule, during which time the conquerors have tried alternately cajolery and violence to establish their own faith and their own customs amongst the conquered have not sufficed to shake the steadfast constancy of the native inhabitants…. Indeed the dominant race has had to yield, and has even been forced to adopt some of the religious and civil practices of the conquered people.” Dubois compared “Muslim pride” with that of the Brahmins:
“[T]he haughty Mussulmans can vie with them in pride and insolence. Yet there is this difference: the arrogance of a Mussulman is based only on the political authority with which he is invested; …whereas the Brahmin’s superiority is inherent in himself, and it remains intact, no matter what his condition in life. Rich or poor, unfortunate or prosperous, he always goes on the principle engrained in him that he is the most noble, the most excellent, and the most perfect of all created beings, that all the rest of mankind are infinitely beneath him… (pp. 302-4).”
Must hurt pride result in oppression?
