By
Seema Chisti
January 6,
2021
Chaudhary
Charan Singh, the former Prime Minister, made a proposal to Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru in 1954. As a Minister in the Uttar Pradesh government, he
wanted Nehru to pass a law so that jobs as gazetted officers could only be for
those who wanted to or had married outside their caste (https:// bit.ly/3oc4ALv).
Nehru turned the proposal down because this struck at the exercise of the free
will of individual citizens in India.
Setting
a Precedent
It is an
indicator of the distance travelled since; that Charan Singh’s State (Uttar
Pradesh) has an ordinance which criminalises inter-faith marriages. The U.P.
government’s focus is firmly on ‘protecting’ Hindu women from marrying Muslim
men. It does this under the pretext of regulating religious conversions.
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Also Read:
Interfaith Marriage: The Dilemma of Inequality In Religion
Facing Muslim Female In Modern World
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The law in
U.P. has already set a precedent for other States ruled by the Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP) such as Madhya Pradesh. In another BJP-ruled State neighbouring
U.P., namely Uttarakhand, a routine press release from the Social Welfare
department highlighted a scheme incentivising inter-faith and inter-caste
marriages. This threatened the communal world view being rapidly ushered in
through a series of so-called ‘Freedom of Religion’ laws in BJP-ruled States.
The press release was seen so out-of-step by the State government, that an
inquiry was ordered by the Chief Minister.
In 1872,
the colonial state drew up a law after it received petitions from Keshub
Chandra Sen of the Brahmo Samaj demanding that people of different backgrounds
be allowed to marry according to their ‘rites of conscience’. The Special
Marriage Act, in 1954, took this further in independent India by taking away
the colonial law’s requirement to renounce religion. However, it still allowed
intrusion by the state, unlike under personal laws, by demanding notices to be
put up in advance. This was done to ensure there were no living spouses or
minors being married, but this clause was misused by communal social groups to
stop such unions (https://bit.ly/3okStM4).
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Also Read:
Why Hindu Women (And Men) Should
Oppose the ‘Love Jihad’ Law
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In
BJP-ruled States, there are many other recent ‘laws’ — on slaughter of cattle,
marriage, and religious conversions — which taken together, target Muslims,
both by denying them shared social spaces and their rights as equal citizens of
the republic. It also destroys the long-standing fraternity in everyday lives
that has long defined India. The ordinance by U.P., the Uttar Pradesh
Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Ordinance, 2020, and the Madhya
Pradesh Freedom of Religion Bill, 2020 are particularly vicious on at least
four counts.
Fundamentally
Wrong
Under the
Constitution, it is the individual citizen who has and exercises rights and
obligations. But these new laws treat religious communities, instead of
individual citizens, as basic entities. By taking away the agency that the
Indian Constitution allows each individual to exercise, this fundamentally
distorts the framework of our republic.
For those
who argue that the Constitution does address communities when speaking of
minority rights and untouchability, it is to only acknowledge and overcome
social discrimination because that impedes the ability of those citizens to
exercise their rights as individuals. By seeing the world as split between
‘Hindus’ and ‘Muslims’, a khap-ian universe, a fundamental modern
characteristic of the guarantee of autonomy to all Indians as individuals is
broken.
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Violate
Privacy, Choice Rights
Second,
these laws blatantly violate the Right to Privacy, which the Supreme Court of
India in a much lauded judgment in 2017, decreed to be fundamental. The level
of state interference in a civil union, which is a solemnisation of a
relationship between two individuals, breaches the basic structure of the
Constitution.
Third, the
provisions impede the exercise of an individual’s right to choose her faith
without seeking state sanction. Under these new laws, everyone — from the
police, local administration and communal groups and families — are given ample
time to interfere and deny the individual, without any locus to do so. In
matters of change of profession, nationalities, electoral choices and even
political parties, no such interference is brought into play. The ruling by the
Supreme Court (1977), which upheld earlier restrictions to convert by the
States of Madhya Pradesh and Odisha (https:// bit.ly/394c4tv), said it did so
to penalise “conversion by force, fraud or by allurement. The other element is
that every person has a right to profess his own religion and to act according
to it. Any interference with that right of the other person by resorting to
conversion by force or allurement cannot, in our opinion, be said to contravene
Article 25(1) of the Constitution of India, as the article guarantees religious
freedom subject to public health (https:// bit.ly/2LjX8zm)”. By making
“propagation” contentious, the 1977 ruling pushed back freedoms in Article 25,
so the mass conversion of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar to Buddhism could invite a jail
sentence! Instead of rescinding the 1977 ruling, these laws further criminalise
an individual’s choice of faith.
Fourth, the
basis of the new law is deeply patriarchal. The nightmare that India traversed
in the 1920s, with competitive communalism fanning charges of Hindu Betis in
North India being taken away like cattle, are being relived now. The pernicious
myth of ‘love jihad’ where adult women are seen as property, is not just a
pamphlet or WhatsApp message. It is now the law. We saw a brief preview in 2017
of the dark consequences of the ‘Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion
Ordinance, 2020’ when the law confronted Hadiya, a 25-year-old health
professional from Kerala, for her marital choice a year after converting to
Islam. This law targets Muslim men, but is also a living hell for Hindu women.
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Also Read:
What is New in the
‘New’ Anti-Conversion Laws?
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Cost of
Inaction
It is with
good reason that India is said to have effected a social transformation, thanks
to the values spelt out and written into the law of the Republic. The
Constitution offered high principles to aspire for, which Indians may never
fully live up to. But that may have been the intention, to set high standards
and ensure we were always jumping just a little bit, to be better. All laws
should meet that brief. However, these new laws do the opposite; they put state
power and the law itself behind majoritarian communal biases which empower
regressive social mores governing marriage and fellowship. Inter-religious
marriages may be less than 2.5% of all marriages, but the promise they hold
goes beyond numbers. They reaffirm the fundamental constitutional premise of
all citizens being equal, besides promoting the ideals of freedom and
fraternity.
It Is
Diabolical
To fan
rumours of ‘love jihad’ even as the government confirmed in Parliament that
there was no evidence of it, is diabolical. But more than that, it is downright
dangerous as it seeds mistrust, and changes fundamental and basic ground rules
that all plural democracies must live by. It is for the court to suo motu
strike these laws down if it wants to preserve the basic structure of the
constitutional edifice.
In
September 1935 when Hitler enacted the Nuremberg Race Laws, it was fear of the
Mischling or the German-Jewish children of ‘mixed’ descent that haunted the
Nazi mind obsessed with purity. At 50% Jew and 50% Aryan, they were a threat to
Nazi ideas. Closely linked to preventing such marital and sexual unions was the
Nazi belief in dodgy eugenics. The tragedy was that these laws were not
protested enough when they were enacted. They ended up guiding Nazi racial
policy for the remaining decade of the Reich (https://bit.ly/2JMo5LL).
We must
never forget the price a society and a country pays for writing hate into law.
-----
Seema
Chishti is a journalist based in New Delhi
Original
Headline: The dark step of writing hate into law
Source: The Hindu
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-politics/‘protecting’-hindu-women-marrying-muslim/d/123996
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