Is Supreme Court an ISIS accomplice,
Mr. Khurshid?
By Sri S. Gurumurthy
https://ramamohanraocheruku.blogspot.com/2021/11/is-supreme-court-anisis-accomplice-mr.html
Hindutva depicts the way of life of Indian people, their state
of mind and ethos.
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Published: 15th November 2021
09:32 AM | Last Updated: 15th November 2021 09:32 AM | A+A A-
Senior Congress leader and former Union Minister Salman Khurshid
Senior Congress leader Salman Khurshid (Photo | PTI)
By S Gurumurthy
Hindutva depicts the way of life of Indian people, their state
of mind and ethos. Hindu, Hindutva and Hinduism cannot be confined to the
narrow limits of religion alone excluding the content of Indian culture and
heritage. Or confined to merely describing persons practicing the Hindu
religion as a faith. Hindutva or Hinduism cannot be equated with narrow
fundamentalist Hindu religious bigotry or as depicting hostility, enmity or
intolerance towards other religious faiths or as professing communalism.” Who
said this? Wait. It is only half the question. Here is the other half.
A book titled Sunrise over Ayodhya authored by an eminent
political leader but not so eminent a lawyer and released recently says that
the Hindutva movement in India is the ideological counterpart of international
Islamist terror outfits — Islamic State
in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Nigerian Boko Haram. Both have killed tens of
thousands of innocent people, kept thousands as sex slaves and concubines,
tortured and mutilated human bodies, forcibly converted people and waged war
against states with the aim of establishing a global Islamic State consisting
of only Muslims, and eliminating all others. What is that book and who is its
author? The answer to both will make the full story.
The answer to the first is that it is the Supreme Court which in
1995 expounded on facts and ruled that Hindutva and
Hinduism are the way of life, culture and ethos of Indian people. The author of
the book who equates Hindutva to ISIS and Boko Haram is Salman Khurshid, a
Congress leader, also a lawyer who asked the court in 2019
to reconsider its 1995 decision. Now, is Khurshid just
equating the philosophy of Hindutva to the ideology of ISIS or Boko Haram? Or
is he mocking the Supreme Court for expounding the ISIS-like Hindutva as the
ethos, culture and way of life of India? Interesting questions which the Indian
discourse is unfortunately ignoring.
Convergent threesome
Khurshid’s party colleagues P Chidambaram, a better known lawyer
and Digvijaya Singh, a better known leader, were at his book release event.
They are an ideologically convergent threesome. Khurshid defended the terrorist
outfit Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), banned by both the Vajpayee
and Manmohan governments, in courts to get it declared as a peaceful outfit,
and also wanted the Hindutva judgment uprooted.
Chidambaram, a better legal brain, used it as the Home Minister to
fabricate the idea of Hindu terror as an equivalent to Islamic terror.
Digvijaya Singh had been endeavoring to create and sustain the
image of Hindu terror for long. The three gentlemen share the view that either
terror has no religion, or if it has, Hindu terror has to be innovated to give
company to Islamic terror. Khurshid’s book now attempts to upgrade the idea of
Hindu terror from local to global status by equating the Hindutva movement in
India with ISIS and Boko Haram. Now look at what ISIS and Boko Haram are, with
which Khurshid compares the Hindutva movement.
ISIS and Boko Haram
The ISIS claims to be the inheritor of the Islamic Caliphate
founded by the earliest Islam to which it mandates the world’s Muslims should
owe loyalty. According to the US think tank Wilson Center, ISIS divides the
world as Muslims on the one side and non-Muslim Kufrs on the other, led by
America, Russia and Jews. It celebrates “terrorism as worship of Allah as He
ordered” Muslims. The Islamic Networks Group (ING) lists murdering innocents,
persecuting Christians and Yazidis, forced conversions, human torture and
mutilation of bodies, oppression of women, sex slavery, concubinage and harsh
punishments as ISIS’ pastime in its endeavour to establish global Islamic rule.
According to Statista.com ISIS has killed, between 2013 and 2018, over 28,000
innocents. The Quint.com reported in 2018 that ISIS holds
some 3,000 women and girls as sex slaves and gifts them to
foreign fighters. Good looking girls of the small Yazidi community of 4, 00,000 are its
first choice as sex slaves. An NBC report of 2015 says
some 1,100 ISIS sex slaves are living in Germany.
Now come to Boko Haram. The Nigerian jihadi group wants to
eliminate fake Muslims and establish true Islamic state in Nigeria. Reuters
reported in 2015 that 2.3 million
people were displaced by Boko Haram, and some 2,50,000
people ran away from Nigeria as refugees. The Independent reported in the same
year that in 2014 alone some 6,600
were killed by Boko Haram. It is with terror outfits with such a record that
Khurshid compares the democratic and electoral movement for Hindutva.
In 2016, 21 years
later, a seven-judge bench of the Court refused to reconsider the Hindutva
decision. In 2019, Khurshid moved the court to refer the
Hindutva ruling to a five-judge bench, but failed. Having failed in the court,
he has now written a book equating Hindutva with ISIS and Boko Haram. Is it an
attack on Hindutva or on the court that approved Hindutva?
SC views on Hindutva date back to 1960s and
1970s
The Hindutva judgment was not shaped by politics. It was
rendered when its opponent, the Congress party, was in power and its exponent,
the BJP, was in opposition. Hindutva entered the Indian political domain in 1991 to be precise, when the BJP and Shiv Sena had included it
as their philosophic mascot in election manifestos. Their elections were
challenged on the ground that Hindutva constituted a religious, communal
appeal. This forced the Supreme Court to answer whether Hindutva was religious
and communal.
In 1995, the Court ruled that Hindutva had
an expansive meaning and inclusive content and was not religious. But the
verdict that Hindutva was dominantly the way of life, culture and ethos of
India was not an innovation by the court in 1995. It
rested on a series of past Constitutional bench decisions of the Court on what
Hinduism meant, including a remarkable judgment by the famous Justice
Gajendragadkar in 1966 and the landmark decision in 1976 by a Constitution bench consisting of Chief Justice A N
Ray, Jaswant Singh, M H Beg, P N Shinghal and R S Sarkaria.
The 1976 case had called for a judicial
probe into the Hindu philosophy to decide whether a Hindu family consisting of
a Christian wife and child could be regarded as a Hindu undivided family. In a
path-breaking verdict, quoting precedents, the Court ruled that, Hinduism being
not limited to religion, a Hindu undivided family could have Christian members
— a most liberal decision indeed in the world of hostile religious ideologies.
The court quoted the global literature, Encyclopaedia Britannica, to support
its ruling on Hinduism.
Not religious, civilisational
Encyclopaedia Britannica makes nine profound points about
Hinduism. One, Hinduism incorporates all forms of belief and worship without
selecting or eliminating any; two, the Hindu, inclined to revere the divine in
every manifestation, is doctrinally tolerant, leaving others — both Hindus and
non-Hindus — to follow whatever creed and worship suit them best; three, a
Hindu may embrace a non-Hindu religion without ceasing to be a Hindu; four, the
Hindu is disposed to regard other forms of worship, strange gods, and divergent
doctrines as inadequate rather than wrong or objectionable; five, the Hindu
tends to believe that the highest divine powers complement each other for the
well-being of mankind; six, the Hindu considers few religious ideas to be
finally irreconcilable; seven, the core of Hinduism does not even depend on the
existence or non-existence of God or on whether there is one God or many;
eight, since religious truth is said to transcend all verbal definition, it is
not conceived in dogmatic terms in Hinduism; and nine, Hinduism is both a
civilisation and a conglomerate of religions, with no beginning, no founder, no
central authority, no hierarchy, and no Organisation. Besides the 1976 decision, the 1995 decision pointed
out that even in the Constitution (Art 25), the word Hindu
includes Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs, implying that Hindu is not just a
religious term.
The 1995 ruling also relied on the
philosopher-statesman Dr S Radhakrishnan and historian Arnold Toynbee to hold
Hinduism is not a religion. Toynbee said: “Hinduism takes it for granted that
there is more than one valid approach to truth and to salvation and that these
different approaches are not only compatible with each other, but are
complementary.” This matches with the first six points in Encyclopaedia
Britannica. According to Dr Radhakrishnan, Hindu had originally a territorial
and not a credal significance, and implied residence in a well-defined
geographical area. Aboriginal tribes, savage and half-civilized people, the
cultured Dravidians and the Vedic Aryans were all Hindus as they were the sons
of the same mother. For him, the Hindu is a civilisational idea.
The 1995 Hindutva ruling also quoted from
justices Bharucha and Ahmadi in the 1994 Ayodhya
demolition case. They had said, “Hinduism is a tolerant faith. It is that
tolerance that has enabled Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Judaism,
Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism to find shelter and support upon this land.” If
Hinduism were just a religion, would it have sheltered other aggressive
religions and helped them to grow? How can the Hindutva ruling, which rests on
such undisputed and unalterable philosophical, historical, factual and legal
grounds, be intellectually disputed or legally reviewed?
Hindutva and Hinduism not different
Wayanad Congress MP Rahul Gandhi keeps parroting that ‘Hinduism
and Hindutva are not the same, Hinduism is good but Hindutva is bad.’ Obviously
he hasn’t read the Supreme Court judgments of 1966, 1976 on Hinduism, on the basis of which it had rendered its
Hindutva judgment in 1995. Rahul cannot be aware that even
his great grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru had once held the same views as the
Supreme Court now. In his Glimpses of World History (1935) Nehru
even accepted the concept of Hindu nationalism. He had said, “It (is) not
easy....to draw a line between Hindu nationalism and true nationalism. The two
overlap as India is the only home of Hindus and they form a majority there” (p 720).
And he went on to say, “A famous disciple of Ramakrishna’s was
Swami Vivekananda, who very eloquently and forcibly preached the gospel of
nationalism. This was not in any way anti-Muslim or anti anyone else.
Vivekananda’s nationalism was Hindu nationalism, and it had its roots in Hindu
religion and culture” (p 507). Nehru had no objection to
Vivekananda’s Hindu nationalism. Writing later in the Foreign Affairs magazine
(January 1937), Nehru emphasised that the “Indian background
and unity is essentially cultural; not religious in the narrow sense of the
word” — exactly what the Supreme Court had said in 1995. That
Nehru changed his mind later, cannot retroactively alter the facts.
Maharishi Aurobindo had said in his famous Uttar Para speech
that India will live as long as Hinduism and Sanatana Dharma will. Mahatma
Gandhi said in his fundamental text Hind Swaraj written in 1909,
in which he refused to change a comma or full stop as late as in 1940
that Sethu in the South, Jagannath in the East and Hardwar in the North and
sacred rivers brought about the unity of India. There was broad convergence among
Vivekananda, Gandhi, Nehru and Aurobindo on the Hindu character of India. It
was blatant pseudo secular, minority appeasement vote bank politics that
distorted the Hindu cultural foundation of India.
QED: Even his party colleague Ghulam Nabi Azad rejects
Khurshid’s atrocious book equating Hindutva with ISIS! As Khurshid has equated
Hindutva approved by the Supreme Court to ISIS, here is the question to him: Is
the Supreme Court an ISIS accomplice, Mr Khurshid?
S Gurumurthy
Editor, Thuglak, and commentator on economic and political
affairs
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