The planned Udupi hijab spark and the need for Uniform Civil Code

Editor’s Note: This series, coming amid the backdrop of the Karnataka hijab row, examines the original debate on the Uniform Civil Code and puts it in its historical context. This is part 1 of a two-part series

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 What began in Udupi recently was just the latest innovation of an old and familiar template of secularist skulduggery pioneered by the Congress and aped by its clones. It began as the “right” to wear the hijab at school and didn’t take long to morph into a million incomprehensible tropes including but not limited to “don’t deny education to Muslim girls,” and so on. The evidence for the fact that it was a deliberate political (secularist) gimmick to bait and outrage Hindus lies in its unsurprising and swift nationwide spread. What is truly spooky is the ready availability of thousands of tailored recruits in all such vile capers of Hindu-baiting — capers which have a history of at least half a century. This is pretty much the truth of the Udupi hijab “controversy”: It is not a controversy but venal politics in which Muslim girl students are being used as cannon-fodder both by secularist politicians and by fundamentalist elements of their own community. If it is any consolation, the aftermath of each such incident opens that singular unresolved issue since India adopted a Constitution for itself: The Uniform Civil Code. But this time, an even more lethal coat has been painted upon the issue — a  petition in the Supreme Court to recognise Muslim females wearing the hijab as a fundamental right! This is indeed the logical climax of the communal symphony first strummed in Udupi and then orchestrated across India. The orchestration to which vast sections of the captive academia, intelligentsia and media happily danced to, was the build-up to somehow “prove” the validity of the sinister “petition”. If an analogy can be made, it is akin to saying that wrongdoing is itself the advance proof of a non-guilty verdict. That the SC has admitted a petition of this nature opens up a cauldron of other pressing problems which we don’t need to get into here.

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Also Read Also read: Interview | Hijab is akin to chastity belt that turns women into sex objects, says Taslima Nasrin as she bats for Uniform Civil Code **Karnataka hijab controversy: Indian democracy enters uncharted territory of grave danger** **Opinion | On ‘Hijab Day’, the only choice is to drop the cloth for ‘No Hijab Day’** **Karnataka hijab controversy: Why Modi government should seriously think about Uniform Civil Code** **History will not be kind to ‘liberals’ cheerleading for hijab and burqa** **Udupi hijab row: A pre-planned move to stoke communal tension in Karnataka’s sensitive coastal belt?** **There’s a good case to ban hijab in schools, but Congress cheers orthodoxy**  

How long should it fester?

The festering wound called the Uniform Civil Code most notably exploded in public discourse during the infamous Shah Bano case, the first nail in Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s ensuing political coffin. Arguably, the last time the UCC issue had caught public attention in any form was during the Constituent Assembly debates, an era when almost ninety percent of the Indian electorate had no clue what these things even meant. Thus, it had taken almost four decades, one horribly wronged old Muslim woman and a blunder-ridden prime ministership to slap our public conscience awake to an issue that was not limited only to the Muslim community but had (has) direct ramifications upon our social harmony and national integrity itself. What Rajiv did in 1985 by overturning the Supreme Court’s verdict in the Shah Bano case is in a way being repeated in the Udupi hijab case. Going to extreme lengths of extreme Muslim appeasement by pandering to its extremist sections. Because… well, because the Congress knows no other way of doing politics. There is a substantial wealth of learned legal literature — including court judgments — on the urgent imperative of formally enacting the UCC as law. Among this, a notable point that emerges is why the UCC was included in the Directive Principles. While this nuance can be more fully elucidated by legal luminaries, a limited point in this case relates to the Constituent Assembly debates on the subject. All stalwarts in those debates were unanimous on the theme that the UCC had a direct and inextricable link to India’s unity and integrity. The original and historical context of these debates on UCC also needs to be re-invoked today given that the fourth generation of post-independence India is largely clueless about it. The Constituent Assembly debate was the interim step after the British transfer of power and before the formal adoption of a Constitution by, for and of the newly-free Indian people. Notwithstanding critiques and criticisms, what stands out almost like a physical reality in the Constituent Assembly debate is the level of attention to detail which was given to every aspect of our national life. Every matter was discussed threadbare, and it is here that the roots of most of our contemporary problems and weaknesses and strengths really lie. The foundational pillar of “major” matters such as defence, education, states, economics, law and order, and social policy — of which the UCC was central — was the unity and sovereign integrity of India. The framers of our Constitution were almost paranoid on this point. Debates pertaining to these areas were tested against the yardstick of this unity because they knew from experience the kind of back-breaking struggles and horrendous sacrifices that our people had suffered to wrest freedom for India. Most of all, they had also paid the ultimate price for it in the form of a blood-soaked vivisection of India — an ancient sacred geography whose civilisational continuity was brutally and irreversibly severed because Muslims wanted a separate religious state for themselves. From this perspective, the endless debates on UCC happening in India cannot be fully grasped sans the details of the tragic story of Bharat’s Partition. And, from a tangential perspective, it remains an eternal surprise — or perhaps not a surprise at all — why Pakistan has never had even the necessity for such debates. After all, both countries were “born” at the same hour.

What they said

Loknath Misra is a name that even a handful of parliamentarians of our time would have heard of. Perhaps his name will ring a bell if we told them that he was the elder brother of former SC Chief Justice Ranganath Misra, famed for heading the Justice Ranganath Misra Commission of Inquiry into the 1984 genocide of Sikhs. Fewer parliamentarians of today will be aware of the fact that Lokanath Misra was also a distinguished member of the Constituent Assembly debates endowed with the guts to speak the plain truth plainly on a range of issues including but not limited to secularism and the UCC. An excerpt from his speech on 6 December, 1948, is a representative illustration of his mien: “Sir, it has been repeated to our ears that ours is a secular State. I accepted this secularism in the sense that our State shall remain unconcerned with religion, and I thought that the secular State of partitioned India was the maximum of generosity of a Hindu dominated territory for its non-Hindu population…I did not of course know what exactly this secularism meant and how far the State intends to cover the life and manners of our people. To my mind life cannot be compartmentalised and yet I reconciled myself to the new cry…Gradually it seems to me that our `secular State’ is a slippery phrase, a device to by-pass the ancient culture of the land. The absurdity of this position is now manifest in articles 19 to 22 of the Draft Constitution. Do we really believe that religion can be divorced from life, or is it our belief that in the midst of many religions we cannot decide which one to accept? If religion is beyond the ken of our State, let us clearly say so and delete all reference to rights relating to religion. If we find it necessary, let us be brave enough and say what it should be…this unjust generosity of tabooing religion and yet making propagation of religion a fundamental right is somewhat uncanny and dangerous…We have no quarrel with Christ or Mohammad or what they saw and said…In the present context what can this word `propagation’ in article 19 mean? It can only mean paving the way for the complete annihilation of Hindu culture, the Hindu way of life and manners. Islam has declared its hostility to Hindu thought. Christianity has worked out the policy of peaceful penetration by the back-door on the outskirts of our social life…Let us not raise the question of communal minorities anymore. It is a device to swallow the majority in the long run. This is intolerable and unjust.” From that Congressman Lokanath Misra to the present-day Congress, the plummeting has been…umm…weighty. A majority of that weight has been inflicted by the Congress upon itself through decades of sustained Muslim appeasement. Thus, when Lokanath Misra correctly predicted appeasement as the “device to swallow the majority,” it has today rung eerily true in the form of Youth Congress president BV Srinivas who filed the aforementioned SC petition to recognise wearing the hijab as a fundamental right. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel was equally direct and unsparing in his warning in the CAD: “I want the consent of all minorities to change the course of history…Whatever may be the credit for having won a Muslim homeland…I respectfully appeal to believers in the two-nation theory to go [to Pakistan] and enjoy the fruits of their freedom and leave us here in peace.” Now, when we briefly turn to the debates on the UCC proper, this is what we see: A Sub-Committee on Fundamental Rights, whose majority members explicitly declared the Uniform Civil Code as a social objective to be definitely attained. Its notable members included Minoo Masani, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur and Hansa Mehta. This is what they wrote in a note of dissent: “One of the factors that has kept India back from advancing to nationhood has been the existence of personal laws based on religion which keep the nation divided…We are of the view that a uniform civil code should be guaranteed to the Indian people within…5 or 10 years…” KM Munshi too, echoed the sentiment: “I want my Muslim friends to realize this…that the sooner we forget this isolationist outlook on life, it will be better for the country…Our first problem and the most important problem is to produce national unity. We think we have got national unity. But there are many factors… which still offer serious dangers to our national consolidation… [one of which is] our personal law… From that point of view alone, I submit, the opposition is not… well advised. I hope our [Muslim] friends will not feel that this is an attempt to exercise tyranny over a minority; [Muslim personal law] is much more tyrannous to the majority.” The opposition in question to the UCC comprised Mohammad Ismail Sahib, Naziruddin Ahmed, Mahboob Ali Baig Sahib Bahadur, and B Pocker Sahib Bahadur, all of them vehemently adamant that Muslim personal law be included in the Constitution. Violation of national spirit From all this and other perspectives, the final decision to include UCC as a Directive Principle was clearly in the nature of a compromise. Almost forty years later, the Supreme Court in its verdict on the Shah Bano case, characterised this compromise as a dead-letter in rather restrained wording: “It is also a matter of regret that Article 44 of our Constitution has remained a dead letter. There is no evidence of any official activity for framing a common civil code for the country. A belief seems to have gained ground that it is for the Muslim community to take a lead in the matter of reforms of their personal law. A common Civil Code will help the cause of national integration by removing disparate loyalties to laws which have conflicting ideologies… We understand the difficulties involved in bringing persons of different faiths and persuasions on a common platform. But, a beginning has to be made if the Constitution is to have any meaning. Inevitably, the role of the reformer has to be assumed by the courts because it is beyond the endurance of sensitive minds to allow injustice to be suffered when it is so palpable. But piecemeal attempts of courts to bridge the gap between personal Laws cannot take the place of a common Civil Code. Justice to all is a far more satisfactory way of dispensing justice than justice from case to case.” Four key points emerge from this judgment. First, that in its spirit, it is entirely consistent with that envisaged by the framers of our Constitution: of unifying a newly-independent India and safeguarding that unity. Second, the indirect searchlight of introspection it casts on the Muslim community’s leadership’s failure at reforming its personal laws—as patently unjust as in the Shah Bano case. Third, its veiled reprimand against the political class—dominated by the Congress—that actually encouraged these regressive Muslim personal laws. Fourth, another reprimand that the Congress, by keeping the UCC in indefinite abeyance was continuing to toy with national integration, bartering it for Muslim votes. Stripped of sophisticated phraseology and sleights of logic, the Muslim Personal Law creates two, or parallel citizenships, so to say: One in which the Muslim citizen is free to subject himself to the Indian CrPC and simultaneously wants no interference in his personal laws from the Constitutional state of India. However, a more nuanced or detailed understanding of the UCC will ensue from a parallel study of (1) the historical journey of Hindu laws and (2) the history of the practical application of Islamic law since Muslim rule became dominant in India for over five centuries. Sandeep Balakrishna is founder and chief editor, ‘The Dharma Dispatch’. Views expressed are personal. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.