HARTOSH SINGH BAL - Majority Rule
The BJP’s view of democracy comes into conflict with the values of a constitutional republic
http://www.caravanmagazine.in/perspectives/majority-rule-BJP
See also
Purushottam Agrawal: Why does the RSS hate the idea of India ?
Modi says Congress committed 'sin' of partition // The Non-politics of the RSS
Haroon Khalid A Gandhi for Pakistan
Shekhar Gupta - National Interest: Secularism is dead!
In the workings of any representative democracy
with a written constitution that prescribes a system of checks and balances,
there is always a tug of war between majoritarian demands and constitutional
safeguards. Since independence, these checks have worked well enough in India
for us to forget the overwhelming threat of the tyranny of the
majority—something that has enabled the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party
government to make a divisive issue of minority appeasement, and make the very
intention of the constitution into a negative feature of our democracy. Born of
the majoritarian impulse, this regime—the first BJP government to command a
clear majority in the Lok Sabha, and to rule more states than any other
party—now seeks to institutionalise it.
Over the last year, the noise generated by constituents of
the Hindu right—from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh to elements within the
ruling BJP itself, such as the member of parliament Giriraj Singh—has often
been dismissed as a distraction from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s real
agenda. But this spin, frequently echoed on India’s editorial pages, does not
take into account that a number of legislative and administrative changes have
indeed taken place around India that give primacy to the RSS’s idea of what
this country ought to be—one contrary to the vision of the republic set down in
the Indian constitution.
In this, the present government is unique. It is not as if
the Congress has never been prey to the majoritarian impulse, but the
overwhelming presence of Jawaharlal Nehru ensured that the constitutional
spirit took root, and in large part prevailed, over the first two decades of
the republic. The Congress’s worst departures from this spirit, such as the
organised massacre of Sikhs in Delhi in 1984, have subverted the law rather
than taking refuge in it.
Earlier this year, the BJP-ruled state of Maharashtra banned
the slaughter of cows, as well as the sale and possession of beef. Such laws
have been passed before, but never has the basis for them been articulated as
an overarching philosophy until now. The union minister of state for home
affairs, Kiren Rijiju, who is from Arunachal Pradesh, offered this explanation
shortly after: “If Maharashtra is Hindu majority, or if Gujarat is Hindu
majority, Madhya Pradesh is Hindu majority, if they are to make laws conducive
to the Hindu faith, let them be. But in our place, in our state where we are
majority, where we feel whatever steps we take, you know, laws which are
conducive to our beliefs, it should be.”
This statement went unchallenged by either the government or
the BJP, to which Rijiju belongs. By this rationale, even if an all-India ban
on beef is not possible, there should be no problem with such a ban in some
states with a Hindu majority, and those who form minorities at the national
level can exercise similar privileges in places where they predominate. But
even Rijiju’s local majoritarianism sounds liberal when compared to how the BJP
works in practice.
Last month, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, the BJP chief minister of
Madhya Pradesh, blocked a project to serve eggs in anganwadis,
shelters for children, in predominantly tribal areas of the state, where local
communities have no dietary laws against them. Following the decision, his
principal secretary told the media this was “a sentimental issue with the CM
from day one.”
This is a lie. Chouhan, in fact, supported a similar project in
2007 in Hoshangabad, a district of Madhya Pradesh where eggs are now omitted
from anganwadi meals. Chouhan’s change of heart came not due to his
convictions, but because a number of Jain institutions insisted on the ban.
Jains are notionally a minority, but a number of them are prominent leaders of
the Hindutva project, including Sunder Lal Patwa, a former chief minister of
Madhya Pradesh, and Praveen Togadia, who is the international working president
of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. This gives Jain bodies a large say in the affairs
of the BJP.
Clearly, being a local majority does not help Madhya
Pradesh’s tribal people. Chouhan’s decision moved us away from Rijiju’s view,
of a kind of situational majoritarianism, and closer to absolute
majoritarianism, ensuring that Hindutva ideology prevails over and above any
concern for local majorities, let alone minorities.
According to Madhav Sadashivrao Golwalkar, who became the
RSS’s second and most influential sarsanghchalak, or head—a man
Modi considers his guru—“All such works which help nourishing and strengthening
this national ethos are ‘national.’ All such groups who consider themselves
distinct from this national ethos and cherish hopes and aspirations in
opposition to the national ones and demand separate rights and privilege for
themselves are to be called ‘communal’.” The Hindu in Bharat could never be
communal, he wrote, because the nation’s “life-values” were derived from the
life of Hindus. As such, “The expression ‘communalism of the majority’ is
totally wrong and misconceived. In a democracy the opinion of the majority has
to hold the sway in the day-to-day life of the people. As such it will be but
proper to consider the practical conduct of the life of majority as the actual
life of the national entity.”
This is a clear articulation of the BJP’s beliefs, and an
idea the party works to transform into fact. Only seven of the 29 Indian
states, and one union territory, have a majority population of non-Hindus. In
Punjab, the most populous of these, the government has long attempted to
legislate against tobacco in line with the Sikh majority’s opposition to it,
which is as potent an issue for religious mobilisation as the Hindutva love for
cows.
It is primarily the BJP’s opposition to a tobacco ban that
has prevented it from becoming law. Last year, the BJP leader Arun Jaitley’s
doomed election campaign in Amritsar was run out of an office at a city
memorial, the Harbans Lal Khanna Samarak. Locally, the choice raised some
eyebrows. Khanna, a BJP leader, was a controversial figure, who in 1984 was
assassinated by Sikh militants. In 1981, he led a protest march that began a
counter-mobilisation against Sikh fundamentalist demands. The march comprised a
mob of Hindus armed with swords, protesting a proposed ban on cigarettes and
tobacco. As they went along, they shouted, “bidi, cigarette piyenge;
shaan se jiyenge”—we’ll smoke bidis and cigarettes, we’ll live with pride.
Today, more than 30 years later, when Punjab’s ruling
Shiromani Akali Dal has no trouble sharing that same election office in
Amritsar with the BJP, the sharp divide between Sikhs and Hindus that cropped
up in the 1980s seems to have subsided. But in spite of the rapprochement
between the two parties, no agreement has been reached on banning tobacco from
Amritsar, or Punjab.
Another example, from the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and
Kashmir, is starker yet. There, cow slaughter has been banned since 1932—a fact
the BJP rarely acknowledges. So, in practice, even Rijiju’s formulation is nowhere near
the BJP’s real position, which amounts to the party insisting on what it thinks
are Hindu interests, irrespective of whether the proponents of these interests
are the majority or a minority in any state.
This is the precise danger a republic is meant to mitigate.
One of the strongest arguments for such a system is articulated in the
Federalist Papers, a series of essays published in the United States in the
late 1780s, when the country’s constitution was being framed. The essays are
perhaps as close as we will ever get to blueprints for a constitutional
republic. In an essay which deals with “The Utility of the Union as a Safeguard
Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection,” James Madison, later to become the
fourth president of the United States, explains the problem posed to a
democracy by what he called a “faction”—a group of citizens united by a “common
impulse of passion, or of interest,” even to the detriment of the larger
community.
The causes of factions in a democracy cannot be contained,
Madison argues; only their effects can. Even that becomes difficult when the
faction in question constitutes a majority. “If a faction consists of less than
a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle which enables the
majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote,” he writes. “When a
majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other
hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public
good and the rights of other citizens.”
The cure to this, Madison declares, is determined by an
enlightened body of representatives elected to the legislature, and by the size
of a republic. The Indian case poses a peculiar challenge to Madison’s views.
The BJP’s core support base consists largely of adherents of Hindutva, and can
be said, given recent evidence, to act in a fashion adverse to the rights of
other citizens. This group can act as a factional majority, since it has a hold
over the party and hence over the government. The parliamentary system has
magnified its power, allowing it to act as a majority even though its voters comprise
no more than 31 percent of the electorate. In this case, representative
democracy has actually strengthened the faction, while the size of the Indian
union, though acting as a check, has not been able to diminish its influence.
The reality we now face was a source of great worry to those
who framed the Indian constitution. Many of the debates in the constituent
assembly revolved around the issue of minorities. The concerns raised were
finally reflected in Articles 29 and 30 of the Indian constitution, perhaps
unique in the emphasis they place on protecting minority rights. The spirit of
the Indian constitution on these issues is best expounded by Article 29(1):
“Any section of the citizens residing in the territory of India or any part
thereof having a distinct language, script or culture of its own shall have the
right to conserve the same.”
Explaining the careful wording of this article, the
constitution’s chief framer, BR Ambedkar, told the constituent assembly that
“it is also used to cover minorities which are not minorities in the technical
sense, but which are nonetheless minorities in the cultural and linguistic
sense.” Therefore, “if a certain number of people from Madras came and settled
in Bombay for certain purposes, they would be, although not a minority in the
technical sense, cultural minorities.” The article would protect the culture,
language and script of such a minority, too. “The only limitation that is
imposed,” Ambedkar said, “is that if there is a cultural minority which wants to
preserve its language, its script and its culture, the State shall not by law
impose upon it any other culture which may be either local or otherwise.” The
constitution drops the word “minority” from the article and escapes any attempt
to curtail its scope through technicalities. So the article clearly extends not
just to the rights of national minorities such as Muslims or Sikhs, but also to
local minorities such as Hindus in Punjab, or beef-eating Malayalis in
Maharashtra.
The practical implications of Article 29(1) are yet to be
fully worked out in a court of law, as there have been very few direct
challenges to the powers of the government that depend solely on it. But there
is no mistaking that by intent it is a direct refutation of what the BJP stands
for. The faction that dominates the BJP government has adversely affected the
freedoms of a large number of Indian citizens. We should not hesitate in
stating that the views that Rijiju represents within the BJP, and the even more
extreme ones that are basic to the RSS, are simply unconstitutional.
http://www.caravanmagazine.in/perspectives/majority-rule-BJP
See also
Purushottam Agrawal: Why does the RSS hate the idea of India ?
The Broken Middle (on the 30th anniversary of 1984)
Hitler's annihilation of the Romanis: “I as a German prefer much more to see India under British Government than under any other...I must not connect the fate of the German people with these so-called ‘oppressed nations’ who are clearly of racial inferiority” (Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, German edition, p. 747)
