Barring a section of Muslims, most minorities in India — including Jews, Christians, Parsis, Buddhists and Sikhs — harbour no complaints

After Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s epochal visit to his constituency Varanasi on December 13, noises have been raised in the media that the “spirit of secularism has been violated”. Article 15 of India’s Constitution insists on equality of all citizens regardless of gender or religion, permitting no discrimination; yet Articles 25 to 30 grant special privileges to the minorities. There is thus discrimination between the majority religion and the minority faiths. The Constitution itself allows violation of its Articles; it doesn’t stop at permitting Muslims to practice their Sharia (personal law) but also prescribes what is allowed to Muslim men and Muslim women. The former can have at a time four spouses but the latter are allowed only one husband. Why?

Think of the hundreds of crores of rupees spent on the erstwhile Hajj subsidy. Ironically, the Muslim leadership itself did not want it since its distribution was a powerful lever of influence. No one contested its abolition when it happened. The Quran does not encourage Hajj done with others’ money, as it remains no longer sacred.

Secularism is a European concept. Until the French Revolution in 1789, there were three houses of the French National Assembly; the Lords, the Commons and the Bishops and other clergy. The Roman Catholic Church had considerable influence on the running of the country. Plus, Christianity provided the monarch with the ideology of reigning until nationalism came to the fore. That is why liberals pressed and strove for separating the State from the Church. In India, the Church did not influence the running of the State which, in any case, was ruled by Britain’s civil Government until 1947. The Bible’s Old Testament makes it clear that to God belongs what is His and to Caesar, who is the earthly ruler, what is rightly his. Secularism or the separation of Church from State therefore stands on a firm and ancient foundation of the Christian faith.

In India, there are several religions and each had its own prescription. Christianity never commanded a large constituency. Islam is a comprehensive prescription of how to live, including the nature of the State. Qaid-e-Azam MA Jinnah declared that Islam and Hinduism are so different that they cannot coexist in one country. They are two separate nations and therefore have to separate. That happened in 1947 without an exchange of population, which disappointed most members of the Muslim League. Pakistan was to be the homeland of Muslims; the Aligarh elite even went to the extent of calling their new homeland the ‘New Medina’. After the abolishment of the Caliphate by Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1924 and exiling the Caliph, Pakistan dreamt of producing a caliph. Muslims in India formed the Khilafat Committee to pressure the British to reinstate the Caliph. Gandhi even became the president of this committee although Jinnah shunned it.

Under the proposal of exchange of population, most Muslims in India were to migrate to Pakistan, while non-Muslims were to migrate to India. Such an idea was implemented by the League of Nations, the predecessor of the United Nations. In 1923, Christians in Turkey were made to move to Greece while Muslims residing in Greece were to cross into Turkey. The scheme was executed diligently and without bloodshed. Dr Rajendra Prasad, India’s first President, wrote India Divided, wherein he suggested that the Muslims who could not move could stay back in India as aliens with visas issued by the Indian Government. Jinnah had readily endorsed this proposal, but strangely Gandhi propagated that Partition had been a ‘territorial’ division and not a religious one. He iterated this to Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee and Rajkumari Amrit Kaur on January 29, 1948.

The point is that most Muslims had voted for the League in the 1945-46 elections. The party, led exclusively by Jinnah, had a single-point manifesto — Pakistan. On August 14 and 15, 1947, when Pakistan and Hindustan were separated, the sovereignty and the Islamic flag had moved to Karachi en route the future Islamabad. With regard to the rights of other minorities like Christians, Parsis and Jews, India has no problems. Christian activities do occasionally cause tension on the issue of the conversion of poor Hindus, but this is periodical. Buddhists and Sikhs have no complaints on religious grounds.

Hinduism is a faith more than a religion. It expects the Hindu to adhere to karma with its reactions, equal and opposite. This core belief is as close as possible to physics. Even God, wherever He is, does not interfere in deciding the bhagya or fate of any individual. Each individual’s karma is believed to be determined on the scale of his expected dharma.

A priest has a duty different from a soldier, a cook from a washerman, a king from a subject and so on. Every other consideration is left to the discretion of the individual. In fact, there are Hindus who are agnostic and even atheist. Karma is each according to an individual and Hindus mostly unite only under a calamitous provocation. Hindu faith has no real connection with running of the State: Hinduism is, thus, toleration personified. A discussion on secularism should be peripheral and mostly unnecessary in India after Partition.

(The writer is a well-known columnist, an author and a former member of the Rajya Sabha. The views expressed are personal.)