November 26, 1949 was the day that the Constituent Assembly finally adopted the Constitution of India, which was promulgated on January 26, 1950, marked in India as Republic Day. This year, November 26 was observed as Constitution Day in Parliament. This should have been an occasion to reflect soberly on the failure of the State to fulfill its obligations to defend the Constitutional rights, liberties and entitlements of vast sections of India’s society. It should especially have been an occasion to reflect on the recent instances of Parliamentarians and persons on Constitutional posts, such as Governors, openly mocking at core values of the Constitution. Instead, Constitution Day 2015 will be remembered as yet another day when the Modi Government and the BJP put on display its discomfort with the letter and spirit of the Constitution.
In Parliament, India’s Home Minister Rajnath Singh said that “secularism is the most misused word,” and “We are facing problems in ensuring social harmony because of the misuse of these expressions.” Rajnath Singh suggested in Parliament that secularism in India should mean ‘panth nirpeksh’ (neutral towards all sects) but instead the Western meaning (dharm nirpeksh or neutral towards all religions) had been imposed on the Indian State.
The Home Minister was reflecting the long-held RSS position, which is that ‘Dharma’ means Hindutva which should be equivalent to Indianness, while other faiths are sects; hence the State must embrace Hindutva while maintaining a distance from all other ‘faiths/sects’. Based on this understanding, the RSS and the Home Minister maintain that “social harmony” can be maintained as long as people of other faiths and beliefs accept Hindutva as ‘Indianness.’ So the Home Minister was in effect echoing recent statements by several BJP leaders suggesting that if only Muslims would give up beef, if only inter-faith love and marriages could be ended, if only Dalits and Muslims and women would accept social ‘Laxman Rekhas,’ it would be easy for ‘social harmony’ to be maintained.
Rajnath Singh implied that the words ‘sovereign democratic Republic’ reflected ‘India’s traditional strength’, while the words ‘secularism and socialism,’ inserted later, were somehow alien to India. Actually, the facts show that soon after the first Constitution Day, the BJP’s ideological forefathers in the RSS had rejected the Constitution lock, stock and barrel, branded it as a bundle of Western imports, and had instead demanded that the Manusmriti be adopted as India’s Constitution! The 30 November edition of the Organiser wrote, “In our constitution there is no mention of the unique constitutional development in ancient Bharat. Manu’s Laws were written long before Lycurgus of Sparta or Solon of Persia. To this day his laws as enunciated in the Manusmriti excite the admiration of the world and elicit spontaneous obedience and conformity. But to our constitutional pundits that means nothing.”
This was the same Manusmriti that Dr Ambedkar had deemed fit to burn in protest, since it was a charter of the subordination, dehumanization and humiliation of Dalits, oppressed castes and women.
Dr Ambedkar had made a distinction between Constitutional morality and societal morality, and had stressed that “Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated.” The RSS and BJP, on the other hand, try desperately to claim that societal morality of the dominant community (towards inter-caste and inter-faith marriages, towards beef, towards women’s social and sexual freedom, towards homosexuality and so on) must be accepted as ‘Indian culture’ by the whole of India – and any assertion of Constitutional morality is a provocation that justifies violence and breaking ‘social harmony.’
Preposterously, Rajnath Singh referred to Ram as “the greatest democrat since he had asked his wife Sita to take the ‘agni pariksha’ (entering fire to prove her chastity) because a man from the lower strata had raised an issue concerning her.” The fact that the Home Minister in the Central Government is not only comfortable with the idea of a husband demanding his wife undergo a chastity test, but actually sees this as evidence of democratic values, shows that the Modi Government replete with feudal societal morality, is lacking in the Constitutional morality that Dr Ambedkar had stressed.
Most shameful was the Home Minister’s attempt to harness Dr Ambedkar to the hate-wagon of the BJP and RSS. In a jibe at actor Aamir Khan, Rajnath Singh said that Dr. Ambedkar in spite of facing humiliation, never left India. But what Rajnath Singh and the BJP can never acknowledge is that Ambedkar quit Hinduism and abhorred the notion of a Hindu India. He quit Hinduism calling it a “veritable chamber of horrors,” most especially towards Dalits. Explicitly rejecting the agenda of a Hindu Rashtra, Dr Ambedkar wrote in his essays on ‘Pakistan or Partition of India’, “If Hindu Raj does become a fact, it will, no doubt be the greatest calamity for this country. It is a menace to liberty, equality and fraternity. It is incompatible with democracy. It must be stopped at any cost.” In 1951, on the eve of independent India’s first-ever general election, the manifesto of Ambedkar’s Scheduled Castes Federation (SCF) ruled out “alliance with any reactionary party such as Hindu Mahasabha and Jan Sangh as communal parties.”
The strategy of other BJP leaders on this occasion as well as in the debate on ‘intolerance’ in the next couple of days, has been to recount the various atrocities against minorities, Dalits and civil liberties committed during Congress rule. The Finance Minister Arun Jaitley for instance talked of the Emergency imposed by Mrs Gandhi, while Meenakshi Lekhi spoke of the communal and caste atrocities at Delhi 1984, Nellie, Hashimpura, Bhagalpur and so on. But can the crimes of the Congress provide an alibi for the BJP and the present Government?
The fact is that the erosion of the Constitutional rights has happened steadily over a period of decades. Congress Governments too trampled on the Constitution repeatedly. The communal pogroms of the 1980s from 1984 to Hashimpura and Bhagalpur, happened as Congress Governments steadily sought to cultivate and consolidate Hindu majoritarianism. A Congress Government opened the locks of the Babri Masjid at the same time that it opened the veins of the Indian economy to be bled by global capital. Kashmir and the North Eastern states have for long been a graveyard of democratic rights and the Constitution. Custodial killings of dissenters, of the poor, of Dalits and of Muslims have been ‘tolerated’ by regimes of all hues for long. It is this systematic hollowing out of the Constitutional mandates and the weakening of the democratic and secular fabric by the Congress that left India vulnerable to the communal fascist BJP, which openly seeks to tamper with the Constitution.
It is not only the secular nature of the Constitution that is under attack. Successive Governments of the Congress and BJP have also eroded India’s sovereign character, allowing the WTO, World Bank, IMF and imperialist powers to shape India’s economic and foreign policies. This December, for instance, the Modi Government is preparing to sell out India’s higher education interests at the WTO Ministerial meeting. These Governments have trampled democracy by ensuring impunity for custodial crimes by the armed forces and the police, as well as for perpetrators of caste and communal massacres; and by failing to uphold the dignity and freedom of women and Dalits. These Governments have mocked at any “socialist” obligations to ensure entitlements of food, jobs and health care for India’s vast majority of India’s poor and deprived citizens.
In Parliament, Rajnath Singh declared in answer to an allegation, that he had never said that “Modi is the first Hindu ruler in 800 years to rule India.” That is true. The statement was in fact made by the VHP leader, the late Ashok Singhal, whom Prime Minister Modi called “an inspiration for generations” following his demise. In July this year, Singhal had called the election of the Modi-led Government in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections as the beginning of a “Hindu revolution” in the country, thanks to which “India would be a ‘Hindu Nation’ by 2020” and would bring about a “Hindu world” by 2030.
Modi in his speech in Parliament called the Constitution a “holy document” and delivered a lengthy homily (pravachan) on the Constitution. But he remained totally silent on the open incitement by MPs, Ministers and MLAs of his party for communal and casteist massacres and murders. Modi and his Government cannot simultaneously swear by Singhal and his Hindu Rashtra slogans on the one hand, and Ambedkar and the Indian Constitution on the other. Its Ministers cannot keep advising detractors and beef-eaters to “go to Pakistan” while paying lip service to Ambedkar and the Constitution. It cannot allow the RSS to impose the laws of Manu in society (massacring Dalits and Muslims, banning inter-caste and inter-faith marriages, killing those who kill cows etc) while citing the Indian Constitution when questioned abroad on growing bigotry. There is a saying ‘munh me raam bagal me chhuri’ (Ram on one’s lips, a dagger hidden under one’s arm). For the BJP and RSS, it is ‘munh me Ambedkar, bagal me Manu’; ‘munh me Gandhi, bagal me Godse aur Golwalkar’; or ‘munh me samvidhan, bagal me Mansmriti.’
