by Ali Sukhanver
Justice
S.R.Sen, a judge of India’s Meghalaya High Court has recently said in a
statement that India should have been declared a Hindu country after Partition,
and that if anyone tried to make it an Islamic country, it would be doomsday
for India and the world. The honourable justice gave this ‘wisely-sensitive’
statement while delivering a judgment on a petition filed by an Army recruit
Amon Rana, who was denied a domicile certificate by Meghalaya administration. Justice
Sen further added, ‘Pakistan declared themselves as an Islamic country and
India since was divided on the basis of religion should have also been declared
as a Hindu country but it remained as a secular country.’ This statement of the
Justice S.R.Sen has given rise to a severe uneasiness among different
communities living in India particularly the Sikh community. The Sikhs are
worried about their future after India is announced a Hindu-homeland. Moreover
if the government of India mistakenly takes the statement of Justice S.R.Sen
serious, where would drown the slogan of the ‘Secular India’.
The
secular status rather the ‘self-claimed’ secular status of India has ever been
looked at with a lot of doubts and suspicions. It is true to some extent that
constitutionally India is a secular state but when we see the Muslims being
butchered in the streets of Gujarat and in the valleys of the Indian Occupied
Kashmir, the impact and impression goes rather otherwise. It is a very
unfortunate fact that in the Secular India, the Muslims, the Sikhs and even the
Christians are brutally persecuted every day. According to a report prepared in
August 2017, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom ranked India’s
persecution severity at ‘Tier 2’ along with Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover on Open
Doors' World Watch List India has risen from No. 31 to No. 11 in the past six
years.
Human
Rights Watch says in an analysis that ‘violence against Christians in India is
used as a tool to meet political ends’. The analysis further says, ‘The acts of
violence include arson of churches, conversion of Christians by force and
threats of physical violence, sexual assaults, murder of Christian priests and
destruction of Christian schools, colleges, and cemeteries.’ And all this is
done by the Hindu extremists who are never taken to task; in most of the cases
they remain scot-free. Same is the case with the Sikh community. An online
magazine Media Diversified has recently published an article of Shuranjeet
Singh Takhar. The writer says, “Since the election of the B.J.P in 2014, Sikhs
have felt vilified within a Hindu nationalist imagination of India, an ideology
known as Hindutva. Looking to silence and erase those who do not conform to its
beliefs, Hindutva posits that India is a state solely for Hindus.”
In the light of different definitions of a
Secular State, one can easily understand what a secular state is. According to
the definition provided by the World Atlas, ‘A
secular state is a country where religion does not play a part in law making’.
Another definition says, ‘A secular state is or purports to be officially
neutral in matters of religion, supporting neither religion nor irreligion. A
secular state claims to treat all its citizens equally regardless of religion,
and claims to avoid preferential treatment for a citizen from a particular
religion or non-religion over other religion or non-religion. Secular states do
not have a state religion or an equivalent.’ If we analyze India in the light
of all these definitions, we would find no secularity there in India. In the
name of religion, every year, hundreds of people are burnt alive in the blazing
inferno of religious extremism in India. Be it the Sikh, Christian or the
Muslim community, no one is safe and secure at the hands of the Hindu
extremists. The government machinery fully protects these extremists by using
all fair and foul means. We have the example of the Babri Mosque; if India were
a secular state, the Babri Mosque would never have been demolished in December
1992. The demolition resulted
in several months of inter-communal rioting between Hindu and Muslim
communities, causing the death of at least 2,000 people, most of them were the
Muslims. If India were really a secular
state, all perpetrators of this demolition must have been taken to task but no
such thing ever happened. Former
Intelligence Bureau Joint Director, Maloy Krishna Dhar claimed in a statement
that Babri mosque demolition was planned 10 months in advance by top leaders of
the RSS and BJP.
Judges, all over the world are usually very learned and well-knowing people but the matter with Justice S.R.Sen seems altogether different. It seems either he knows nothing about the so-called secularity in India or he is intentionally expressing his ignorance. The condition of Justice S.R.Sen doesn’t seem different from that of King Hamlet for which Shakespeare has used the term ‘antic-disposition’.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own
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