At the outset let me note that I have the greatest respect for India’s Supreme Court which has been instrumental in preventing India from becoming a Pakistan. So it is with reluctance that am writing about a disagreement with one of the Supreme Court’s recent judgements, on Sabarimala.

In the meantime, till this issue is resolved, one would hope the Kerala government will continue to enforce the judgement, but with sufficient restraint so as to prevent any injury or harm.

I must begin by stating that I have no religion – in fact, I oppose all religions. I consider religion to be divisive, at times inhumane, and generally lacking in respect for reason and scientific evidence. But I also defend everyone’s right to their beliefs and forms of worship, so long as they do not physically harm anyone.

My anti-religion position does not represent our party’s view. Our party has no view on any religion or on any religious matter that does not involve physical harm. We have nothing to say as a party about Sabarimala temple’s custom of not allowing women in a particular age group to enter. The Supreme Court’s judgement, which has made an issue out of a non-issue, has taken us by surprise.

I’m summarising below our party’s main objections to the Supreme Court’s judgement.

First, the government and Supreme Court are our servants, paid by us – the citizens – in accordance with the social contract we gave to ourselves through our Constitution, to perform one key job: to defend our private property and freedoms – including our freedom of belief no matter how absurd.

It will be an impudent misuse of the power that we entrusted our servants on 26 January 1950 for them to start telling us what to believe or how we may believe. Social or cultural or religious change is totally outside the scope of the functions that we gave the government or the Supreme Court.

Justice D.Y. Chandrachud makes a startlingly huge category error when he considers that he has the power to correct customs or rituals that may be inconsistent with fundamental rights. He must go back to the basics to be reminded that citizens are never accountable to the fundamental rights. These rights are a restriction solely on government, never a restriction on individuals. Individuals must remain entirely unrestricted at all times unless they actively harm someone. Any perceived stupidity of the master (citizen) is not justification enough for the servant (government functionary or judge) to correct the master’s behaviour. The reason we have an independent judiciary is not because we wanted to create an unelected source of power who would tell us what to believe, but to stop the elected executive from unchecked misuse of power.

A Supreme Court judgement is always an instrument of the state – and involves the use of violent, coercive force through the executive. But the use of force to change people’s non-violent beliefs is fundamentally wrong. In this case, a massive police build-up in Kerala is being used to change the way people choose to worship. The liberal and humane approach would have been for the judges to buy out the temple with their own money, then persuade the believers to change their belief. Or they could have simply expressed their views humbly in any blog or academic journal or newspaper, for the temple worshippers – the citizens and owners of this country, their paymasters – to consider.

These ideas so basic that it is amazing that the Supreme Court has even entered this space. Justices Chagla and Gajendragadkar had made this issue abundantly clear in their 1951 Narasu Appa Mali Bombay High Court judgement, in which they said that uncodified personal laws do not fall within the jurisdiction of courts. Matters of culture and personal or religious belief are not laws.

Of course, the freedom of religious belief is not absolute and where any grievous physical harm is caused (e.g. sati, child marriage, torture of animals), the government and the courts do have a responsibility to step in and provide protection. For instance, a law was recently made in Nepal to criminalise the isolation of menstruating women. This is a borderline case but it can be justified since real harm was being caused to some women. The Sabarimala case is totally different: no woman has ever been physically harmed.

Second, the question of property rights. Who owns this temple? It turns out Sabarimala is owned by a Devaswom Board under the Travancore­Cochin Hindu Religious Institutions Act, 1950, and also receives some state funding. The petitioners, in this case, used the existence of various forms of government intervention in the temple to argue that “after the insertion of Article 290-A in the Constitution and the consequent State funding, no individual ill-practice could be carried on in any temple associated with the statutory Devaswom Board … as this constitutional amendment has been made on the premise that no ill-practice shall be carried on in any temple which is against the constitutional principles”.

This argument is deeply flawed. In the first instance, it is wrong for the government to dabble in religious assets. Our party’s position on the ownership of temples by the government is very clear: the state must never own, manage or fund any religious asset including temples or mosques. These must be fully privatised – returned to the community immediately.

But even where the government has temporarily got involved in temple management due to some quirk of history, it doesn’t make such a temple the property of government or into a public place like a railway station. The government merely acts as a trustee, a clerk managing the accounts, a servant. There is no implication that the state somehow owns the temple and can, therefore, dictate religious practice or intervene in matters of belief. In fact, it is precisely to get out of such conflict of interest, that the servant of the people – the government, must never be put in the position where it has to manage religious property.

Third, a key argument reported in the papers was that banning the entry of women into the shrine is gender discrimination. But what do the judges expect from religion – an obscurantist, irrational belief system that originated thousands of years ago and which involves myriads of discriminatory and divisive practices? There are no “insiders” or “outsiders” in science but every religion claims that followers of other religions can’t be “saved”. Religion is the antithesis of reason and must be treated as a separate zone of human contemplation. So long as no one is harming others physically, they should be allowed to imagine and do anything they wish. Remember: People are not minions of the government or courts; it is the other way around.

This judgement is an attempt at social engineering and a foundational attack on freedom of thought and religious belief. It attacks the core principles of liberty enshrined in India’s Constitution.

We believe the Supreme Court should urgently reconsider this judgement. At the same time, we don’t want the Parliament to make any further laws in this matter as that would amount to further interference in religious affairs. At the same, time, we ask the Modi government to hand back all temples to the community and repeal all religious laws, thereby nipping this evil of socialist statism in the bud.