Reexamining Secularism :The Ayodhya Dispute and the Equal Treatment of Religions (original) (raw)
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The "Ayodhya" Case: Hindu Majoritarianism and the Right to Religious Liberty
29(1) Maryland Journal of International Law 305, 2014
The long-standing contest over a 1500 square yard plot of land, situated in the city of Ayodhya, located in the district of Faizabad in the state of Uttar Pradesh in north India, has become a site where religious groups, pilgrims, lawyers, and even gods are battling to establish their claims of rightful ownership. The issue has been simmering in independent India since its birth in 1947 and arose well before that time. The courts have been called upon time and again to adjudicate on this fraught issue, where their decisions are not only defining the parameters of the right to freedom of religion, but are implicated in the very construction of faith and belief. In this article, I examine how the right to freedom of religion has emerged in law, focusing on the 125-year-old property dispute in Ayodhya. I discuss how the reasoning of the 2010 Allahabad High Court judgement partly resulted in reproducing and reinforcing Hindu majoritarianism through its interpretation of the right to freedom of religion and the broader implications of the decision on the meaning and definition of secularism in Indian constitutional discourse. I also underscore how the law and judicial discourse has played a central role in enabling the Hindu Right, a right wing political and ideological movement intent on establishing India as a Hindu State and a key player in the Ayodhya dispute, to successfully pursue its agenda through the right to freedom of religion.
The following paper will analyse the concept and context of the 'juristic person' as it takes form in the Ayodhya case and the Ayodhya judgments (2010 and 2019) thereby revealing in a concrete sense the deep and dense entanglement of the religious, the secular, and the national. After a brief introduction to the case, where the title was given to Ramlalla as a juristic person by the Supreme Court, the paper moves on to show that the concept had arisen in Europe which had provided the historical and theoretical context for its employment in relation to the Hindu deity in colonial and post-colonial Indian jurisprudence. The next section will analyse the applicability of limitation on the plaintiffs Ramlalla and Janmasthan (as juristic persons) as discussed and adjudicated upon by the judgments of the High Court as well as Supreme Court. This will be followed by a discussion of the argument of the continuity of faith, belief, and worship at the disputed site 'since time immemorial'. The penultimate section will focus on the implications of the Supreme Court's denial of juristic personality to plaintiff 2 (Janmasthan) and its affirmation of plaintiff 1 (Ramlalla) as a juristic person in the 2019 judgment. It will argue that the very
‘Not a Question of Theology’? Religions, Religious Institutions, and the Courts in India
Comparative Legal History, 2013
Courts have played an important role in defining the relationship between religions and the state in India. Litigation by or against religious institutions has obliged the judiciary to engage in quasi-theological reasoning in order to determine what is ‘religious’, and therefore beyond state control, and what is ‘secular’, and therefore subject to government regulation. In pre-colonial India, religious conflicts were settled by means of local arbitration or by the threat or fact of violence. After British legal institutions were established, groups and individuals learned to use the courts to settle such conflicts. This tendency to seek legal solutions to religious disputes has continued in independent India. Since the state tends always to seek an increase of its powers, courts frequently decide such cases to the detriment of the litigants. Examples studied include the Maharaj Libel Case (1862), the Ramakrishna Mission Case (1995), and the Sri Aurobindo Society Case (1982).
South Asian History and Culture, 2019
While religious groups have recurrently approached the state and its institutions to rationalize their acts and selves, government taking recourse to referee religious concerns has had a long history. The colonial state in India was replete with specimens of the intermix of seemingly incompatible elements of the religious and the secular, in this case, religion and the legal network, avowedly one of modern state’s key secular institutions. In the qasbah town of Amroha where in 1895 a dispute occurred between Shia and Sunni Muslims about the wording of azan (call to prayer), both sides lined up with petitions and memoranda to win over a verdict on their side. The British authorities played it well, to their own advantages and whims. Similarly, over a communal strife between some Muslims and Parsis of Bombay in 1874, a series of letters to newspapers invoked the British sense of justice and fairness. While ‘a lover of peace’ sought strict actions against the perpetrators of violence, a certain ‘superior race’ pledged their loyalty and law-abiding nature. Several arrests were made as a follow up but charges could not be proved against a large number of the captives. Disputes and lawlessness thus became an arena for the government to play a role in determining what was right or wrong and who could have the final word where laws and rulings, not scriptures, determined the course of religious destinies and identities. This essay explores the intermediary nature and significant interventions of the state in handling the tumultuous relationship between religion and law, rendering them even more volatile.
A Leap of Faith: The Construction of Hindu Majoritarianism through Secular Law
2014
This article describes the competing models of secularism that have been debated and contested in postcolonial India. I focus on the constitutional legal discourse and judicial pronouncements on the meaning of secularism in India and on the increasing influence of the Hindu Right—a conservative and religious political movement seeking to set up India as a Hindu state— on shaping the contours of secularism in contemporary law. The struggle over the meaning of secularism came to a head in an Indian High Court decision in 2010. The case involved a dispute over the legal title to a piece of 17 land in the northern Indian town of Ayodhya, where a sixteenth-century mosque once stood and was destroyed by the mobs of the Hindu Right, and the Hindu Right’s claim that the site marks the spot where the Hindu god Ram was born. The case reveals how the right to freedom of religion has been used to establish and reinforce Hindu majoritarianism through secular law in India.
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