Supreme Court of India

Thiruvananthapuram: The spokesperson for Syro Malabar Church, Fr Paul Thelakkatt, has argued that the January 2 verdict of the Supreme Court prohibiting the use of religion in politics would not serve the cause of secularism as long as the 1995 order of the apex court that defined Hindutva as a way of life is not revisited.

“As long as Hindutva is interpreted as a way of life, and not anything associated with religion, it offers right-wing Hindu parties to inject religion into the electoral arena through the backdoor,” Fr Thelakkatt said.

Fr Thelakkatt said that the January 2 verdict of the seven-judge Bench did not even perfunctorily mention the word ‘Hindutva’. “It is this silence that makes the January 2 verdict a feeble attempt to protect the secular fabric of the country,” he said.

Eminent jurist N.R. Madhava Menon said that Fr Thelakkatt’s argument was valid as there were people in the country who were convinced that Hindutva was nothing but a proxy for the establishment of ‘Ram Rajya'. Dr Menon said that the lawyers arguing the latest case (Abhiram Singh vs C D Commachan) had wanted the judges to have a re-look at the 1995 interpretation of Hindutva. “However, the court dismissed the exhortation saying that it was not an issue before its consideration,” Dr Menon said.

The jurist said that Justice Verma had tried to make a differentiation between Hindutva and Hindu religion. “The 1995 verdict essentially suggested that Hindutva was a larger national construct within which were encapsulated even non-Hindus, including minorities and atheists,” Dr Menon said. Even V.D. Savarkar, the man who first theorised about ‘Hindutva’, had separated the Hindu religion from Hindutva. “Hinduism is only a derivative, a fraction, a part of Hindutva,” Savarkar writes in his book Hindutva.

Fr Thelakkat scoffs at the theory. “Vedic heritage and the purity of Aryan blood are the reigning themes of the concept. How can the Hindutva of Aryan blood and vedic roots be India’s culture,” he asks. “The idea will undermine the religious beliefs of the country’s minorities and will bring the scheduled castes and tribes, who were subjugated in the name of caste, under the control of Hindutva. This can even lead to denial of opportunities that have now become a Constitutional right,” he adds.