Endless Contradictions

Even when the contradictions and problems with the different-laws-for-different-religions slam into other values that liberals hold dear, they just look the other way, write Harsh Madhusudan and Rajeev Mantri in A New Idea of India.

 

Take gender equality, for example. Liberals do believe in it. And obviously, triple talaq clashes with that value. And yet, when triple talaq was made illegal:

“A significant number of ‘secular’ politicians and intellectuals argue that women-friendly reform should come from within the community.”

But the same folks have no problem when groups want to enact laws against over-the-top superstition (in Hinduism, of course), what they call “blind faith”:

“This is a strange distinction, for faith, by definition, is blind.”

And who decides what is blind faith v/s good old faith anyway? (The point here isn’t whether such efforts are good; the point is about the inconsistency).

 

Having differentiated Indians based on religion, assigning different laws to each group, the contradiction becomes evident at the time of doling out benefits like gas subsidies, and almost every other subsidy:

“When it comes to economic redistribution, and the welfare state, the ghettos disappear for the Nehruvian worldview, and we all become Indians once again.”

Such a setup, where the government can arbitrarily decide when we are one people and when we are different people is guaranteed to produce one outcome - bias, both deliberate and accidental.

 

Why are educational institutes allowed to follow different rules if they are minority institutions? Maybe there are valid reasons, but the contradiction rears its head here too:

“Top ranked institutions like St. Stephen’s College in Delhi, Christian Medical College in Vellore, St. Xavier’s College in Kolkata and countless missionary schools across India clearly declare themselves to be minority institutions and admit Christian students through explicit quotas; all of this is done at a subsidy, implicit and explicit, from Indian taxpayers, who are largely Hindus.”

In a secular country, why should any institution that associates itself with religion in any way, be funded by the state? Orwellian secularism again.

 

As if all this isn’t bad enough, we have ridiculous rules that are asymmetric between Hindus and other minorities. Who is being discriminated here?

“By law, a Hindu cannot be a member of the NCMEI (National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions)… Non-Hindu Supreme Court judges or a local district collector can be trusted to judge knotty theological issues pertaining to Hinduism… Even though a Christian or a Parsi can define policy and adjudicate issues concerning Muslims and vice-versa, somehow a Hindu can be disqualified from doing the same.”

 

In the 2014 elections, each side raised a massacre: Godhra, and 1984. You can call that politics as usual, but even people like Amartya Sen claimed they differed:

“There is no philosophy of killing Sikhs in the Congress.”

Really, that’s a difference? So Nazism is only bad because their philosophy called to eliminate the Jews, not because of their actions? Whereas Mao’s Great Leap forward which resulted in the deaths of millions is OK because, hey, communist philosophy never called to kill them? This is such a ridiculous argument that it deserves the contemptuous response in the book:

“(Since the Congress) can actually kill in practice, there is no need to kill in theory.”

 

It’s one thing for politicians to not budge, to stay hypocritical. But it doesn’t end there, does it? The acknowledged intellectuals, most of whom are not politicians, subscribe to these views too.