Aarti Tikoo Singh: Sabarimala and the Liberal Regression // Keerthik Sasidharan - The churning of tradition
Several secular
liberal intellectuals in India are conflicted over the Supreme Court verdict on
Sabarimala. Their main argument is that a secular state and judiciary must
refrain from intervening in religious matters. First of all, India is
not secular in the Western sense. Secularism in India means equality of and
respect for all religions, as conceived by our Constitution. That is why in
India, you can’t jest about religion, let alone, draw cartoons and paintings
without risking serious consequences.
You try satirizing religion and you will
end up getting arrested like my “Hindu Right wing” friend was for cracking a
joke on a Hindu temple, last week. Now in this scenario,
religion remains deeply embedded in the state and the state remains attached to
religion in both peace times and conflict too. The very nature of politics,
hence, revolves around religious identity. This is no secularism; it is no
separation of religion and state, of the European Enlightenment kind.
Therefore, this
absolutist position that the Supreme Court should have stayed away from
intervening in religious practices of the Sabarimala temple, is wrong. Because,
the noninterventionist position assumes that India is a secular state in the
normative framework, where the state and religion leave each other alone to do
whatever they want. Religion, for example, in the US, does not get the right to
feel offended and the right to prosecute offenders for hurting religious
sentiments. There is no such parity in India. As of now, there is slim
possibility of getting rid of blasphemy laws and replacing it with a law on the
lines of the First Amendment in India.
Be that as it may,
what’s troubling here is that the liberals are taking a regressive line that
the state and the judiciary should turn a blind eye to the customs, traditions
and rituals which violate fundamental rights like the right to equality and the
right to constitutional remedies. This non-
interventionist argument not only
encourages the superficial secularism of India but also keeps India stuck in
perpetual misogyny and other kinds of bigotry.
If it were left to the
absolutists and noninterventionists, Dalits would have been still persecuted by
not just upper castes but by a retrograde jurisprudence too. The Indian state
cannot and should not let the tyranny of the male-dominated clergy and priests
prevail in the name of religion. It would be travesty of justice if the Supreme
Court of India had chosen to stay silent on the patriarchal notion that
menstrual women are impure, and from a religious point of view, not eligible to
pray to a god or deity. Such parochial beliefs sustain the culture of gender
discrimination and disrespect for women even if it is forbidden by law.
Most
importantly, the Indian Constitution and law cannot treat menstruating women
“impure” and lesser humans as considered by certain religious codes and
cultural practices. Any religious or
cultural practice that violates an individual’s fundamental rights, needs state
and judicial intervention. Religion cannot and should not have unlimited
autonomy and that too, at the expense of other fundamental rights. The Indian state and
the judiciary must intervene in religious matters even if it is just one
petitioner seeking justice on the grounds that a religious or cultural practice
violates his/her fundamental rights. Nothing is more sacrosanct than an
individual, as a unit of justice.
Keerthik Sasidharan - The churning of tradition
In the absence of
explicit harm to any group of persons, the wisest course of action in matters
of religion is to let communities of believers evolve norms on their own
Midway through a
documentary (Kettukazcha) by the filmmaker and scholar, Madhu
Eravankara, a deep truth emerges: “The most obscure history is the history of
the obvious”. Few social relations are more commonplace in Kerala, or much of
India, as a temple and its devotees. Fewer histories are more obscure than that
relation, the evolution of ritual, and the source of its vitality. In his
methodically documented film, Professor Eravankara traces the life cycle of a
temple festival in Chettikulangara, deep inside southern Kerala. Early on, we
see men and women, young and old, across castes, work under the fierce tropical
sun to construct large sized wooden structures on wheels. There is a
physicality to this worship of the goddess, where human bodies struggle and
sweat, where there is no reward but the very labour of ritual itself.
It is hard not to be
moved by this — ordinary craftsmen, traders and housewives in service of an
ideal. For much of urban India, these rituals/ festivities are indistinguishable
from chaos, exotica, and, ultimately, a form of mania. What is lost in this
distancing is the recognition that these festivities and rituals are lived
manifestations of answers to a question rarely asked: what is the ultimate
aspiration that governs a Hindu’s world view? These rituals are the bedrock on
which the edifice of Hinduism as a living practice stands.
Asking similarly about
the ultimate philosophical value of Western societies, we learn that their
thought returns time and again to the question of the greatest social Good
using Reason. Who is eligible to this Good has changed over time, but the
preoccupation has remained consistent. From Plato’s Republic to
John Rawl’s ‘veil of ignorance’, the question of maximal good has found
frequent expressions. Over millennia, the resultant institutional manifestation
of an answer to this question has taken various forms: from the cruel Spanish
Inquisition to Hobbes’s Leviathan to social democracies, and
so on.
In Jewish and Islamic
societies, the answer to the question about the ultimate value leads us to
their steady commitment to manufacture, sustain, and regulate group solidarity.
The great Maghrebi historian of the medieval era, Ibn Khaldun, calls this asabbiyah. This
solidarity is not for solidarity’s sake, but rather a preparatory groundwork
for the arrival of what Biblical scholars call eschaton, the
Muslims call qiyamat, or the end of time. Thus we find institutions
in these societies making efforts to regulate identities through circumcision,
prayer laws, marriage, even death. The goal is to demarcate clearly who is
within and who is outside the sphere of commitment and affiliation.
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