India

"The murder of Shraddhanada finally made the British rulers turn this attitude into law: “In 1927, section 295A was enacted to extend the ease with which ‘wounding religious feelings’ by verbal acts could be prosecuted.” Apart from punishing the murderer, they sought to punish Shraddhanada as well, retro-actively and postumously...."

"This present-day effect of Section 295A could easily convince the scholars to sign a petition against this undeniably despotic and un-secular law."

"But if the Arya Samaj’s words provoked unwanted Muslims deeds, they were part of the problem and had to be remedied. However, in spite of this intention to prevent riots, the new law did not end the recurring Muslim murders of Arya Samaj leaders until WW2 nor the concomitant riots, as discussed by Dr. Ambedkar. It was the Partition that broke the Arya Samaj’s back, driving it from its power-centre in West Panjab with the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic College in Lahore. After Independence, anti-Islamic polemics were blackened as “communal” by an increasingly powerful “secularism”, and thus abandoned...."

"Historically the law was enacted to prohibit books that offended Muslims, and to silence Hindus... Section 295A was not instituted by Hindu society, but against it. It was imposed by the British on the Hindus in order to shield Islam from criticism. Thus...: “In 1927, under pressure from the Muslim community, the administration of the British Raj enacted Hate Speech Law Section 295(A)”... The reason for its enactment was a string of murders of Arya Samaj leaders who polemicized against Islam. This started with the murder of Pandit Lekhram in 1897 by a Muslim because Lekhram had written a book criticizing Islam. A particularly well-publicized murder took place in December 1926, eliminating an important leader, Swami Shraddhananda, writer of Hindu Sangathan, Saviour of the Dying Race (1926), next to VD Savarkar’s Hindutva (1924) the principal ideological statement of Hindu Revivalism. (However, the trigger to the murder lay elsewhere, viz. the protection he gave to a family of converts from Islam to Hinduism.) Moreover, there was commotion at the time concerning a very provocative subject: Mohammed’s sex life, discussed by Mahashay Rajpal in his (ghost-written) book Rangila Rasul, more or less “Playboy Mohammed”, a response to a Muslim pamphlet disparaging Sita as a prostitute. Rajpal would be murdered in 1929...."

"When coordinated acts of violence are justified as the inevitable result of hurt feelings, legal precautions against violent displays of religious passion may be said to have backfired."

"In India, the notion that to be truly tolerant in religion is to refrain from criticism of religion is a widespread secularist ideal. But this ideal has long been conjoined with the assumption that the party criticized will be unable to contain violent reaction. One result has been to give strategic value to violence as a way of proving the point."

"Because religion is “rooted in the sentiments,” the judge concluded, religious debate is likely to provoke a riot, and that is all it can do. Religious debate is pointless and therefore unjustifiable; the right publicly to controvert arguments therefore does not properly extend to religion. To enter into religious debate is nothing but a provocation, an act calculated to arouse hatred. Therefore, it is intolerable."

"In 1927, section 295A was enacted to extend the ease with which “wounding religious feelings” by verbal acts could be prosecuted. The purpose was to curb religious violence by curbing provocative speech. But the strategic field the law put into place worked differently: it extended the strategic value of demonstrating that passions had been aroused that threatened the public peace, in order to induce the government to take legal action against one’s opponents. Section 295A thus gave a fillip to the politics of religious sentiment."

"The association of sentiment and violence enshrined in section 295A was not only a product of concerns with law and order; it was also the result of a critical view of religious proselytizing. Section 295A was in- tended to provide a legal tool to restrain the religious criticism associated with proselytizing by the Arya Samaj."

"By 1915, this attitude was changing. I refer to a legal ruling against Arya Samaj preacher Dharm Bir,who was found guilty under Section 298 of “using offensive phrases and gestures... with the deliberate intention of wounding the religious feelings” of the Muslims present in his audience, and under Section 153, for “wantonly provoking the riot which subsequently occurred.”.. Dharm Bir had delivered a public lecture critical of Islam, following which a group of Muslims beat up several Arya Samaj lecturers. Ten Muslims were convicted for rioting, but it was felt that something must be done to punish Dharm Bir and the Arya Samaj. The Arya Samaj was charged, and a judge was brought in who could assure conviction... Winning the case against Dharm Bir required a new position on religious controversy. The judge found it by condemning not only the tone of Dharm Bir’s language, but religious debate itself, when he declared, “logic has never been known to convert any one”; Dharm Bir “does not know that logic has never saved a soul and that religion is rooted in the emotions and sentiments”. Because religion is “rooted in the sentiments,” the judge concluded, religious debate is likely to provoke a riot, and that is all it can do. Religious debate is pointless and therefore unjustifiable; the right publicly to controvert arguments therefore does not properly extend to religion. To enter into religious debate is nothing but a provocation, an act calculated to arouse hatred. Therefore, it is intolerable."

"India's constitution represents the second type. A list of limitations is attached directly to the freedom of expression clause. The list includes expression that interferes with the sovereignty and integrity of India...."

"Do we realise how that hastily-ordered ban [of the book The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie] has changed India forever? .... When the Government promptly submitted to this illiterate hysteria, it convinced [Hindus] that secularism had become a code phrase for Muslim appeasement."

"Ram Swarup, now in his seventies, is a scholar of the first rank.... No one has ever refuted him on facts, but many have sought to smear him and his writing. They have thereby transmuted the work from mere scholarship into warning. ... The forfeiture is exactly the sort of thing which had landed us where we are: where intellectual inquiry is shut out; where our traditions are not examined, and reassessed; and where as a consequence there is no dialogue. It is exactly the sort of thing too which foments reaction. (...)"Freedom of expression which is legitimate and constitutionally protected," it [the Supreme Court] declared last year, "cannot be held to ransom by an intolerant group or people." To curtail it in the face of threats of demonstrations and processions or threats of violence "would amount," the Court said, "to the negation of the rule of law and surrender to blackmail and intimidation."

"Are there no limits to what Muslims can demand, and get away with, in the imagined cause of their religion? ... There is no reason why our political leaders should have to start kowtowing and running scared everytime a bunch of semi-literate mullahs gets up and starts making a noise. ... We have just seen Shiv-Sena government in Maharashtra buckle under Muslim pressure and suspend the release of Mani Rattnam’s Bombay. It is a film about inter-religious marriage and the triumph of peace over communal hatred. ... After seeing the film they came up with a list of objections so absurd that they should have been considered ludicrous in our secular land but they have been taken seriously. They object, we are told, to the last shot. The Muslim girl while eloping with her Hindu husband carried the Koran in her hand. This was bad, they said, because it seemed to imply that her marriage had Islamic sanction. ... Nor did they approve of the film’s first scene which shows a woman lifting her burqa off her face.... Offence was taken, we are told, because a Hindu family was shown being burned alive. A Muslim family is also shown being similarly murdered, because this also happened in the terrible riots of 1992, but our Muslim objectors are selective in their disapproval."

"For example in Pakistan, as recently as October 31, 1991, all the five judges of the Highest Islamic Court ruled that the punishment for defiling the Rasul was death and not life imprisonment as the prevailing penal law provided. But in countries like India where the Shariat law no longer prevails, but where Muslim opinion counts, any critical discussion of the Prophet and Islam is regarded as lacking in good taste. It is unsecular, a great lapse from accepted ideological morality. Critical writings are as a rule edited out and even often banned."

"And no one has contributed to making these things work, to smothering free inquiry and speech in this vital sphere as the liberals and secularists. We supported the ban on Rushdie's book at that time, writes a leading commentator, as we knew the reactions the book would provoke. Does that "prudence" not go to the fundamentalists to work up a fury each time they want to have their way? Is that not what they are doing now?"

"The point about Khomeini's fatwa is that it has worked: it has intimidated into silence scholars and writers all over the world. And the agitation against Hasan will work too: it took three years for a Muslim scholar to say as much - or, as little - as he did. It will take twice that many years for another one to say half as much."

"Muslims in India have often sought shelter under Sections 153A and 295A of the Indian Penal Code (I.P.C.) for preventing every public discussion of their creed in general and of their prophet in particular.1 Quite a few publications which examine critically the sayings and doings of the Prophet or other idolized personalities of Islam, have been proscribed under Section 95 of the Criminal Procedure Code (Cr.P.C.) as a result of pressure exerted by vociferous, very often violent Muslim protests. Little did they suspect that the same provisions of the law could be invoked for seeking a ban on their holy book, the Quran."

"In the West, the enactment of secularism went hand in hand with deepening criticism of religion, which was pushed from its pedestal and recognized as just another fallible human construct, open to questioning and criticism. In India, by contrast, secularists cheer for the application, formally or in spirit, of Section 295A to outlaw religious criticism – except when it is Hinduism that gets criticized. And that is why the AAR scholars, in solidarity with their Indian secularist friends, have never moved a finger about minority-enforced censorship but made a mountain out of the Doniger molehill."

"An early warning against perpetuating the minority complex was sounded in a memorandum submitted to the Constituent Assembly’s committee on minorities by Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, a leading member of the Christian community. She said: “The primary duty of the committee appointed to look into the problem of minorities is to suggest such ways and means as will help to eradicate the evil of separatism, rather than expedients and palliatives which might, in the long run, only contribute to its perpetuation.” She added, “Privileges and safeguards really weaken those that demand them…” A distinguished member of another minority community, Muhammad Currimbhoy Chagla, wrote in his autobiography in 1973: “I have often strongly disagreed with the government policy of constantly harping upon minorities, minority status and minority rights. It comes in the way of national unity, and emphasises the differences between the majority community and minority. Of course it may serve well as a vote-catching device to win Muslim votes, but I do not believe in sacrificing national interests in order to get temporary party benefits. Although the Directive Principles of the State enjoin a uniform civil code, the Government has refused to do anything about it on the plea that the minorities will resent any attempt at imposition.” The false equation of secularism and minorityism of the Congress is repeated in the policies of the National Front Government."

"First of all, they assume that India is a secular state, which it is not. Every secular state on earth by definition observes equality before the law for every citizen regardless of religion. India, by contrast, has different family law systems (marriage, inheritance) depending on one’s religion, e.g. Muslim men can immediately impose a divorce while all others have to pass judicial procedure (thus also causing discrimination by gender for Muslim men vs. Muslim women). Moreover, it has arrogated the right to reform Hindu law, while it passively abides by the other law systems, e.g. it has abolished Hindu polygamy but continues to allow Muslim polygamy. So, it discriminates between religions. It extends those discriminations legally and constitutionally to the fields of education (where minorities are privileged over the Hindus) and places of worship (where politicians plunder Hindu temple funds while respecting those of churches and mosques, sometimes even financing these out of Hindu temple funds). (Ch 13)"

"The BJP proposal to enact a Common Civil Code in replacement of the existing religion-based Personal Law systems is the very quintessence of secularism. Today, contrary to Mira Kamdar's claim, India is not a secular state, for unlike genuinely secular states, India has no equality before the law regardless of religion. Thus, getting a divorce is extremely difficult for a Christian, is a matter fr judicial proceedings in the case of Hindus or of Muslim women, and is the unilateral exercise of an unfettered right of repudiation in the case of a Muslim man. What the BJP wants is to bring India in line with the secular states of the world by enacting a common law equally applying to all citizens. The qualification of the self-styled secularists as "pseudo-secularists" is definitely justified by the fact that they support the continuation of legal religion-based discrimination all while vilifying the only political force willing to secularize Personal Law."

"It is no matter of doubt that marriage, succession and the like matters of a secular character cannot be brought within the guarantee enshrined under Articles 25 and 26 of the Constitution. Any legislation which brings succession and the like matters of secular character within the ambit of Articles 25 and 26 is a suspect legislation."

"[He expressed the hope that Goa's example of a common civil code would one day] awaken the rest of bigoted India."

"“We would like to State that Article 44 provides that the State shall endeavour to secure for all citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India…There is no necessary connection between religious and personal law in a civilised society. It is a matter of great regret that Article 44 of the Constitution has not been given effect to. Parliament is still to step in for framing a common civil code in the country. A common civil code will help the cause of national integration by removing the contradictions based on ideologies.”"

"Where more than 80 percent of the citizens have already been brought under the codified personal law, there is no justification whatsoever to keep in abeyance, any more, the introduction of the 'uniform civil code' for all the citizens in the territory of India."

"In the BJP statements of the last few years the most prominent 'communal' item is the Common Civil Code demand; but pushing that one would be a grave mistake. True, this is an impeccably secular concern, amounting to no more than the implementation of the existing Article 44 of the Constitution.But precisely for these reasons, this initiative should be left to the secularists, whose inaction on this point is a permanent measure of their dishonesty. There are excellent arguments against polygamy and unilateral talaq, but nobody will believe the BJP if it says that it was concerned about the plight of Muslim women."

"[Women in Islamic countries] are exposed to male domination as a rule rather than as an exception... If anyone protests... as I have done, you are sure to be branded as a witch... What I demand is freedom for women from male domination and a uniform code... It that can be construed as blasphemy, I cannot help it."

"As a group, the secularists, especially the Leftists, have not summoned the courage to insist that in order to ensure the survival of the secular India state, Muslims should accept one common civil code, and that Article 370 of the Constitution, which concedes special rights to Jammu and Kashmir mainly because it is a Muslim-majority state, should be scrapped... Even so I find it extraordinary that those who call themselves modernizers and secularists-the two terms are interchangeable-should shirk the logic of their philosophy of life."

"Indeed, over the years I have had many a good laugh at the pompous moralism and blatant dishonesty of India's so-called secularists. Their specialty is to justify double standards, e.g. why mentioning murdered Kashmiri Pandits is “communal hate-mongering” while the endless litany about murdered Gujarati Muslims is “secular consciousness-raising”. Sometimes they merely stonewall inconvenient information, such as when they tried to deny and suppress the historical data about the forcible replacement of a Rama temple in Ayodhya by a mosque: given the strength of the evidence, all they could do was to drown out any serious debate with screams and swearwords. But often they do bring out their specific talents at sophistry, such as when they argue that a Common Civil Code, a defining element of all secular states, is a Hindu communalist notion, while the preservation of the divinely-revealed Shari’a for the Muslims is secular. That’s when they are at their best."

"Then there is the matter of the separate civil code for the minorities. Marriage and inheritance laws are, perhaps on top of some sacramental dimension, quite secular matters. Recognizing and institutionalizing inequality between the citizens of India in these secular matters on the basis of their religion is definitely a case of constitutional communalism. Or rather, let us not be too harsh on the Constitution itself, for it does call on the law-maker to eventually abolish the religion-based law systems. It is political communalism on the part of the parties that refuse to implement the constitutional provision for the eventual enactment of a common civil code."

"Genuine secular states have equality before the law of all citizens regardless of religion. By contrast, India has different civil codes depending on the citizen's religion. Thus, for Christians it is very hard to get a divorce, Hindus and Muslim women can get one through judicial proceedings, and Muslim men can simply repudiate their wives. The secular alternative, a common civil code, is championed by the Hindu nationalists. It is the so-called secularists who, justifying themselves with specious sophistry, join hands with the most obscurantist religious leaders to insist on maintaining the present unequal system. Likewise, there exists a legal inequality in matters of temple management, pilgrimage subsidies, special autonomy for states depending on their populations' religious composition, and the right to found religious schools; and this inequality is defended by the so-called secularists because it is invariably to the disadvantage of the Hindus. The Hindu nationalists favour the secular alternative of equality regardless of religion."

"No wonder that in India Muslims want separate schools for their children and claim Urdu as their language. They want their Personal Law (which mainly means polygamy), and resist enactment of a uniform civil code for all. They are against family planning so that their population may grow unchecked. In short, in countries where Muslims are in a minority and the state is not Islamic, they insist on living an alienated, unintegrated and “superior” life by agitating for concessions specified by their Islamic Shariat. No amount of falsification of history can humour them into living with others on terms of equality. Therefore Congress-culture politicians and pseudo-secularists should at least inform the minority whose cause they espouse, but to whom they never dare read a lecture, that secularism and fundamentalism are mutually exclusive, and that in the Indian secular state the Muslims cannot practise their fundamentalism. Furthermore, they can also be told that history can no longer be distorted, that it cannot be made the handmaid of politics, and that therefore they need to feel sorry if not actually repentant about the past misdeeds of Muslims."

"So, India is a secular state if all citizens get the same treatment in law regardless of their religion. Is this the case? Of course not: Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Parsis have different law systems, chiefly because Muslims insist on it. So, contrary to all those fear-mongers’ loud proclamations that “the BJP constitutes a threat to the secular state in India”, firstly, India definitely is not a secular state, and secondly, the BJP wants to enact a Common Civil Code and is thereby the only major party that wants to turn India into a secular state. The other major parties including the long-ruling Congress Party, by contrast, keep on promising their Muslim voters that they will preserve legal Apartheid between the religions and prevent India from becoming a secular state."

"As the legacy of this scenario, Indian girls are still being sold to West Asian nationals as wives, concubines and slave girls. For example, all the leading Indian newspapers like The Indian Express, The Hindustan Times and The Times of India of 4 August 1991, flashed the news of a sixty year old “toothless” Arab national Yahiya H.M. Al Sagish “marrying” a 10-11 year old Ameena of Hyderabad after paying her father Rs. 6000, and attempting to take her out of the country. Al Sagish has been taken into police custody and the case is in the law-court now. Mr. I.U. Khan has “pointed out that no offence could be made out against his client as he had acted in accordance with the Shariat laws. He said that since this case related to the Muslim personal law which permitted marriage with girls who had attained Puberty (described as over 9 years of age), Al Sagish could not be tried under the Indian Penal Code (IPC). Besides Ameena’s parents had not complained.” (Times of India, 14 August 1991). But this is not an isolated case. I was in Hyderabad for about four years, 1979-1983. There I learnt that such “marriages” are common. There are regular agents and touts who arrange them. Poor parents of girls are handsomely paid by foreign Muslims for such arrangements. Every time that I happened to go to the Hyderabad Airlines office or the Airport (which was about at least once a month), I found bunches of old bridegrooms in Arab attire accompanied by young girls, often little girl brides. “A rough estimate indicated that as many as 8000 such marriages were solemnised during the past one decade in Hyderabad alone.” (Indian Express Magazine, 18 August 1991). In short, the sex slave-trade is still flourishing not only in Hyderabad but in many other cities of India after the medieval tradition."

"Many a time aggrieved parties (like divorced Muslim women) have approached the courts for redressal and many a time the Supreme Court has asked the government to explain the steps it has taken for securing uniformity in the personal laws, particularly those of the Muslims, leading to the enactment of a common civil code for all Indians."

"An Anti-Common Civil Code Convention was held by Muslims at the Talkatora Indoor Stadium in New Delhi on July 4, 1995. The Convention demanded that the Muslims should be exempted from the purview of Article 44 of the Constitution which envisages such a code. Asad Madani, the chief of the Jamiat, called the demand for a common civil code a conspiracy to finish off the Muslims in India. He advised all Muslims to have four wives to increase the Muslim population and to enhance their influence with the Government. Zafaryab Jilani described the move for a common civil code as anti-Islamic and aimed at finishing Islam in India. Mufti Abdul Razzaq of Bhopal wanted Muslims to wage jihad against the Government and to kill those who opposed Muslim Personal Law. Many more separatist statements were made. If the Muslims were concerned about equality with devotees of other faiths, they would not oppose a common civil code meant for and applicable to all Indians. Instead of opposing it they should grab this opportunity to get into the proposed code all the good things in the Shariat concerning the "high status of women in Islam" about which Muslims are so vociferous."

"This totally non-secular arrangement was meant to be only temporary, for the Constitution stipulates in its directive principles (Art. 44) that the State shall endeavour to enact a Common Civil Code. In 1995, the Supreme Court reminded the Government of this directive principle, and directed it to report on the progress made in the matter... The BJS-BJP has always demanded the implementation of Art.44, but the majority has blocked this secular policy time and again...The Common Civil Code is not a demand of Hindu society (certainly not a priority), but is intrinsically a demand of secularism... The trouble of raising this impec­cably secular and explicitly constitutio­nal demand should be left to the secularists; as long as they don't put it on the agenda, the present religion-based personal law systems are a standing testimony to the hypocrisy of the secularist establishment. Equality before the law regardless of religion is an essential requirement of a secular state, and it is a measure of the perversion of India's political parlance that BJP opponents actually defend the separate religion-based civil codes in the name of secularism."

"The classic example given is the Shah Bano case of 1985: repudiated by her husband, the Muslim woman Shah Bano went to court to force him to pay alimony, which Islamic law forbids; the Supreme Court upheld her claim on the basis of equality before the law (Hindu women would have the right to alimony in her case), but under Muslim pressure, Rajiv Gandhi's Congress Government voted a law overruling the verdict and reaffirming the Islamic rules on divorce, at least for Muslims."

"A Common Civil Code has been a long-standing demand of the Jana Sangh-BJP, and therefore it is deemed a “communal” demand. However, anyone outside the ambit of Indian secularism, anyone who can see through its veil of fallacies, would call this a secular demand. Indeed, it is enjoined in the Directive Principles of the Indian Constitution. To be more precise, the Nehruvians sidelined this demand by only giving it a place among the non-enforceable Directive Principles, but at least it forms part of the Constitution. The Supreme Court has asked the Government to report on its steps towards a Common Civil Code, a request gone unanswered by the past two Congress Governments. Equality of all citizens before the law regardless of religion, hence a Common Civil Code, is a defining trait of all secular states."

"We have to insist on a common personal law for all citizens of India."

"The failure to adopt a Uniform civil code [has the effect that] Muslim women suffer because they do not have an equal right of inheritance, because they cannot easily obtain a divorce, because they can be divorced by their husband at their whim or caprice."

"There is nothing non-secular or sectarian in demanding that the provisions of Indian civil laws should apply evenhandedly to all."

"One wonders how long it will take for the Government of the day to implement the mandate of the framers of the Constitution under Article 44. ... There is no justification in delaying indefinitely the introduction of a uniform personal law."

"The state shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India."

"The official doctrine of the BJS/BJP is called Integral Humanism.... it is the alpha and omega of ideological training sessions of RSS and BJP workers."

"(...) Integral Humanism is most akin to the Christian-Democratic movement in Europe."

"Integral Humanism shall be the basic philosophy of the Party."

"I believe in Integral Humanism which is the basic philosophy of Bharatiya Janata Party."

"If you would want to honestly criticize the BJP through a book, it would be Upadhyaya’s ‘Integral Humanism’, but even the sheer mention of that book is absent from the immense majority of ‘expert’ publications about the BJP..."