Introduction
Our Constitution framers were conscious of the fact that there was a need to transform society for bright future. Even though the main aim of the nationalist struggle was to overthrow the British Raj, the need of the hour was to transform a society that had a dismal record and understanding of human dignity and worked on the tyrannical hierarchy of caste that disproved self-evident individual rights. This idea helped our leaders to make a conscious choice of institutions and symbols that formed the basis of such a transformative articulation of politics. For example, Ashoka’s Wheel of Law, a symbol from a Buddhist era, on our national flag was a reminder for every citizen and the state to commit to dharma. The nature of dharma practised by Ashoka was secular, and the dharma aims to undone the worst practices prevalent at that time in India. After the India attained independence in 1947, the commitment to secularism in India did not only mean a commitment to freedom of religion, but also a commitment to eradicate with religious practices considered being at odds with liberalism. In other words, secularism not only relates to state neutrality towards all religions, but also to the desire to undertake social reform.
Destiny of the Secular Script
Two issues have complicated the project of secularism in India. First, the state may be impartial towards religion, but it is not that state actors and individuals in society are impartial towards religion. Second, there exists no agreement in India of religion being relegated to the private sphere. In fact, the opposite is true. In India, there is freedom for people of all religions to pray in large numbers in varying frequencies every week, and they do so collectively and in public. This fact points out to the idea that political appeals are usually made through religious spaces and spokespersons.
In India, because societal and individual decisions are still based on and influenced by religious conditioning and imperatives, the state cannot manage to be indifferent to religion. After pondering over the issues of secularism and religion for over 65 years, it has emerged that the state has accepted religious neutrality as its accepted behavioural script, but society and certainly individuals (even when they are state actors) have failed to accept the same.
This fate of the secular script has garnered much limelight in the recent times. As observed over the period, bureaucracy has majority of tacitly Hindutva supporters and some court judgments over the last two decades have highlighted religious morality or interpreted Hinduism in particular ways. It is also noted that Hindutva has increasing spread its base among the urban middle class in tier-one and tier-two cities and business persons.
Democracy provides the right to every person to support any ideology, for example, if the left can exist and be supported by many people, so can the right. However, Hindutva is not only the statement of a political ideology, but also a process which is claimed to make Hinduism and Indian nationhood almost coterminous. No heed was paid to this issue by the Constitution framers, even as elected representatives from the right actively argued in favour of a Hindu nation in the Constituent Assembly, but the same was denied by Nehru and the Congress.
Breakdown of Tolerance
Although the idea of secularism as per the Indian state can be understood as the impartiality of the state towards religion in addition to the necessary interventions in the religious domain to safeguard some rights, Indian society cannot be said to have attained secularism completely. This concept can be better suited to the idea of ‘scale of tolerance’. For example, in some places, society is more tolerant of other religious and caste groups and, in some places, it is less, but nowhere in India is society perfectly secular.
Being a deeply patronising value, tolerance is an independent, individual choice, and no one can be forced to be tolerant. As tolerance is influenced by the perceptions an individual possesses about another community, its implementation is a matter of individual dispensation and benevolence.
Communal riots that took place in recent years have testified to an extent the breakdown of religious tolerance in society. As we live in a society where tolerance has a weak societal foundation, it is easy for the anti-social people to incite the mob for political gains to vandalise public property and kill innocent people. We as a society have failed to make ourselves tolerant to many issues, even as many have been treating it as a sought-after value. Hate speeches by various politicians only make the case worse.
Let us take few examples to understand the level of tolerance. First, many Muslims, single women and men and people from the northeast face difficulty in getting accommodation in the cities they work. The logic offered for this includes reasons such as that such people may be involved in ‘bad’ or ‘immoral’ acts or may cook and eat food that according to the landlords is not good or acceptable. Icing on the cake is that some local society associations also prohibit certain types of people to live in their places. Even if they manage to bag an accommodation, higher rent and charges are levied on them. The lack of any law that prohibits a landowner from discriminating against people on the basis of religion, race, gender or marital status also helps this intolerant rental discrimination to go unabated. In essence, a person’s perception of what a group represents (single women, Muslims, people from the northeast) allows that person to informally institutionalise his intolerance of such groups
Second, majority of parents warn their children not to marry a person who is dark and of different caste and religion. Even as study by Ahuja and Ostermann reveals that the idea of same-caste marriage has seen a decrease, many matrimonial ads still want same-caste marriages. However, majority of those having intercaste marriages mainly belong to lower castes, Scheduled Castes and Other Backward Classes (OBC). In addition, khaps have their ways in northern India to kill those who they considered as having bad marriages or marriages within same gotra.
Third, it has been observed that the recruiters in private organisations scrap resumes on the basis of last names, prefer people of the same caste and sometimes profile people based on region. For example, a call centre recruiter revealed that they don’t recruit people from Bihar as it is assumed that they don’t have such a good English. She even said that they also reject the resumes of Muslims. A research in 2005 in Chandni Chowk, New Delhi, revealed that banks often are unwilling to lend money to Muslims as they are seen as defaulters. To make a matter more serious, some even reported to be detained by police without any reason.
Domination of the Majority
Finally, it has also come to fore that many private schools don’t induct underprivileged OBC students under the government’s initiative of Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) as they are of the view that their behaviour and language will have a bad influence on other students and schools.
Essentially, the problem is that even if the state formulates a law to protect religious and caste groups, the whole process gets interrupted by a society that fails to understand and value the rights of other groups or individuals. There is a section of people that can’t stand the empowerment of certain religious minorities, majorities or outsiders supports the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Shiv Sena and other politicians like Mr. Owaisi.
It is also observed over the period that majority in India doesn’t want to share their rights and facilities with other minority groups, and it is the reason that benefits and rights, economic opportunity and social equality are not properly extended beyond the majoritarian fold. Even as it is evident from the studies that Hindus most often capture the benefits of reservation, recently Muslims have been granted reservations in some states, via an incorporation into the State’s OBC list.
Conclusion
Growing the culture of tolerance in society is need of the hour, broadly through legislation if necessary. Like social evils such as untouchability and the practice of Sati have taken long time to be eradicated, it will be a good step to also starting to create institutional mechanisms to deal with hate speech.