It speaks much for the perversity and hypocritical nature of mainstream political discourse that you need to be a declared minority to be accorded fair treatment and the right to run your own institutions.

Congress, desperate to retain Karnataka after a string of state losses since 2014, played the minority card last week when it decided that Lingayats are a non-Hindu religious minority. The reasoning: since their 12th century reformer, Basavanna, rejected the authority of the Vedas and caste distinctions, the community can be deemed to be non-Hindu.

Political observers see this as a clear effort to divide the Lingayat vote, said to be around 15% in the state, and deny a consolidation behind BJP, whose chief ministerial candidate BS Yeddyurappa is a Lingayat.

The state’s reasoning is obviously specious, for Hindu sects vary so much with one another in terms of doctrines and practices that almost all of them can qualify as minority communities in some way or the other. It’s like trying to pretend that Catholicism and Protestantism are mutual opposites, and if one is labelled Christian, the other cannot be.

Worse, unlike Abrahamic religions, which are driven by fundaments, including belief in a specific historical founder and one holy book, Hinduism has had no founder, only reformers and divine avatars, an amorphous mix of doctrines and inspired metaphysics. Various sects may follow different – often contradictory – paths without denying their broader identity as Hindu.

There are doctrinal differences between Shaivites and Vaishnavites, between mainstream Hinduism and the Arya Samaj, between believers in Advaita (non-dualism) and Vishishta Advaita (a variant created by Ramanujacharya, a 12th century Tamil saint), and each one of them can claim special status of some kind.

While the Lingayats will have to wait for a central nod to get their minority status, the fact that no one in BJP is taking a clear position for or against this cynical move by Congress tells us all that we need to know: all communities prefer the minority tag. The state’s decision has already prompted demands from other communities – like the Kodavas of Coorg (Kodagu) – for minority status.

In the 1980s even the Ramakrishna Mission, which was under pressure from Bengal’s Communist government to reconstitute the governing bodies of some of the Mission-run colleges, claimed it was a non-Hindu minority institution and hence insulated from state interference under Article 30 of the Constitution. This article guarantees the rights of linguistic and religious minorities to establish and administer their educational institutions.

This brings us to the crux of the issue: our political class has essentially subverted the purpose of the constitutional provisions to protect the rights of minorities by interpreting them as the right to play ducks and drakes with majority-run institutions. The idea behind Articles 15, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 and 30 was to ensure that majoritarian tendencies did not stamp out the rights of minorities; instead these provisions have been narrowly interpreted to mean that the same rights – to administer their religious, cultural and educational institutions – do not apply to the majority. Thus, the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD), India’s richest temple, is run not by the majority community, free from state meddling, but state-appointed politicians. Between the six southern states, somewhere around 1,00,000 temples are directly administered by the state.

An additional villain was inserted into the Constitution by UPA, when the 93rd amendment introduced clause (5) in Article 15. The purpose of this article is to guarantee non-discrimination by the state “on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them,” but clause (5) ensures the exact opposite.

Clause 5 reads: “Nothing in this article or in sub-clause (g) of clause (1) of Article 19 shall prevent the state from making any special provision, by law, for the advancement of any socially and educationally backward classes of citizens or for the Scheduled Castes or the Scheduled Tribes in so far as such special provisions relate to their admission to educational institutions, including private educational institutions, whether aided or unaided by the state, other than the minority educational institutions referred to in clause (1) of Article 30.”

What this means is that only minority institutions are exempt from laws like the Right to Education Act, while majority institutions, even if set up entirely by private funds, are not. This clause subverts the non-discrimination ideal by making discrimination against the majority community central to the RTE and other such Acts.

This background explains why all communities – whether Hindu or non-Hindu – prefer the minority label. It is the only way the grubby hands of the state can be prevented from interfering with educational and religious institutions. Right now, it is only the majority community that faces this discrimination.

A private member’s bill, drafted by the minister of state for HRD, Satyapal Singh, seeks to end this glaring discrimination by making changes to Articles 15 and 30, among others. Not with any view to denying the minorities their rights, but to see that the majority community is not denied equal treatment. Thus, clause (5) in Article 15 will go, and the word “minority” in the other articles will be replaced with phrases like “all sections of citizens”.

It is a pity that a so-called Hindu party is frozen into inaction for fear of being labelled communal. Maybe it is time for Congress, which is out to woo the Hindu vote, to take the lead and claim credit for the same.

If neither BJP nor Congress has the courage to do this, it would be nothing but “wilful blindness” to a genuine case of discrimination embedded in the Constitution and its implementation.