A Magic Wand Moment: SC Bans Communal Politics

A Magic Wand Moment: SC Bans Communal Politics

Sometimes the Supreme Court (SC) with its frequent interventions seems like the proverbial good fairy with the magic wand. It is the highest court in the land and cannot be denied. Even politicians must obey it.

It instructs traffic policemen to get strict with red light jumpers and city speedsters. It tells politicians to remember the Constitution. It bans Jallikattu, only to be roundly defied.

But armed with its torrent of strictures, it certainly increases the cash income of various enforcement agencies.

 “No politician can seek a vote in the name of caste, creed or religion,” intoned Chief justice T.S. Thakur in a rather wishful Supreme Court (SC) order of January 2^nd 2017.

Justice Thakur was heading a 7 judge bench on the matter and announced the verdict days before he retired from the SC.

The Chief Justice nevertheless had to use his vote in favour of the order to break through the three each judgements.

Judges who agreed with his view were MB Lokur, SA Bobde and LN Rao.

Chief Justice Thakur added for good measure that the election process must be a “secular exercise”, completely ignoring the  present realities of vote-bank politics that Prime Minister Modi has been trying to break out of with exhortation to support “Vikas”.

The ruling came at long last on a petition filed by a politician in distant 1996! The apex court was revisiting a 20 year old judgement that called Hinduism a “way of life”.

The fact that the judgement was not unanimous is telling, as telling perhaps as the Indira Gandhi era (1976) insertion of ‘secular’ into the Preamble.

The dissenting judges, DY Chandrachud, Adarsh Kumar Goel and Uday Umesh Lalit termed the order a ‘judicial redrafting of the law”, and that it reduced “democracy to an abstraction”.

The judgement preceded the imposition of the model code of conduct by the Election Commission (EC) on January 4^th. And it will need to be observed and enforced by the EC in the coming couple of months and beyond. But determining its breach in subtle ways will not be easy.

Results for all five states going to the polls, Uttar Pradesh, Manipur, Uttarakhand, Goa and Punjab, will be out on March 11^th.

But this ruling, unless superseded by another in future, will be in place for other coming elections too.

It is an irony that it is difficult to say which of the contending parties, candidates and states now going to polls will be most hampered by the judgement.

But can it be really this simple? Will these and other forthcoming elections be fought on merits and issues alone?

After all, the SC has only reiterated what is supposed to be done in the first place as per the Indian Constitution since  1976.

Or will the politicians find euphemisms, metaphors, innuendoes, proxies, events, victims, deflections and surrogates as usual. Putting out polarising messages are thought to motivate voters. 

Some parties project themselves as protectors of minorities and specific castes. Some are clearly set up along these lines from the word go.

Most politicians have been careful to not directly step on such banana peels anyway. But political correctness in India does not mean the same thing as it does in an increasingly multi-cultural West, because the native Caucasian and nominally Christian populations are in a vast majority. 

Nor for that matter does it compare with countries that profess a state religion and even follow religious law such as the sharia.

Here in India, issues of caste, creed and religion have a distinct economic dimension that towers above issues of discrimination and affirmative action or as we often call it, ‘reservation’.

And secularism as practiced here, may, in fact, fly in the face of the majority community in cruel, discriminatory, ways. It may seek to underplay or even obliterate religious observances for fear of stepping on secular toes.

In this particular instance sequentially, five state elections are taking place after the momentous disruption of demonetisation.

So will the debate on the effects of notebandi and its aftermath overshadow all else? Will it become a referendum on the increasingly left-leaning policies being pursued by Prime Minister Narendra Modi?

If so, the chances of the BJP and NDA doing very well might overshadow judgements such as this one.

Almost all politicians quoted from the different political parties were quick to pay lip service to the SC judgement by saying they welcomed it.

But you could almost see their brains whirring with strategies on how to energise their voters without falling afoul of it.

An obvious effort began almost immediately after the verdict.

It was to blame the BJP and the Congress for making it necessary for the SC to pronounce on the subject in the first place. Might as well get the kettles out to call the pots black.

One man’s “way of life” is another man’s discrimination in the artificial world created by Indian secularism. It is not a native concept at all. Tolerance is. Not secularism. So better luck with the new Chief Justice and Jai Hind!

For: SirfNews

(843 words)

January 13^th, 2017

Gautam Mukherjee