How can this house run?

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is back from playing global statesman, Vishwaguru, ‘land of Gandhi’, ‘Mother of Democracy’ and all, abroad. Back in the thick of what he loves best in India – election campaigns. After all, when you are abroad, you are forced to be on your best behaviour. At home, especially in front of adulating crowds, you can be yourself, and no one will question you, unlike that journalist at the White House.

Anyway, in Madhya Pradesh earlier this week, he made an excellent point: If there is one law for one member of the house and another for the other, Modi asked, how can the house run?

Also Read: 'Dog-whistle politics': Opposition parties slam PM Modi's UCC remarks in Madhya Pradesh

He was justifying the BJP’s renewed quest for a Uniform Civil Code just as 2024 approaches, while criticising the Opposition for questioning its motive.

The Prime Minister is right. The Uniform Civil Code is an aspiration given voice in the Constitution itself – that someday, all the people of this large and diverse nation will feel confident enough in their stake in Indian democracy as to be able to overcome the stipulations of their different religions, castes and tribes and agree to a common set of laws governing such personal aspects of our collective lives as marriage, inheritance, divorce, etc., and abide not by the diktats of some holy book from another age but by the modern ideas of justice, liberty, equality and fraternity enshrined in our Constitution. Someday, we must get there.

But by the same token, we must ask the Prime Minister, since he’s running the ‘house’, how can the house run if every member in the house is made to hate every other member citing one reason or the other – Hindu-Muslim, Hindi and non-Hindi, Hindutva and non-Hindutva, North-South, Metei-Kuki, and so on? And in that house, if two members are fighting over something, should the head of the house tell them to stop and learn to live with each other or take the side of one member and constantly instigate him against the other member? At home, as fathers and mothers, do we constantly infuse difference and hatred into the minds of our children against one another? When they fight, do we take the stronger child’s side and constantly instigate her against the weaker one so that we can have her loyalty? The Manipur room in our house is burning. Isn’t it lesson enough?

How is it that the Prime Minister talks Gandhi when he goes to other ‘houses’ but Savarkar in his own house? Is it that he wants peace in all other houses but not in his own? Were Gandhi, Nehru, Patel wrong in saying that members of the house should not fight amongst themselves, and that such infighting was the reason why ‘Bharatmata’ fell to foreign invasions? Why did Godse murder Gandhi for saying so? Who filled that hatred into Godse’s mind? How come we have never heard the Prime Minister appeal to members of our house not to hate each other and fight against each other?

Also Read: More Opposition parties join the anti-UCC chorus

Let’s also ask, while the Prime Minister wants the civil laws to be the same for all, how come the criminal laws, which are indeed the same for all, are being applied differently to different members of the house, and are being loaded violently against some members of the house? Some members of the house want to eat beef, or live by selling cowhide, while another set of members worship the cow. How did it become okay for the latter to lynch and murder the former, being members of the same house and living under the same criminal laws? How has it become okay to have criminal laws that have been written to punish the victims and their families, rather than the perpetrators of violence and murder? How has it become okay for the police to let go of the lynch mobs and turn on their victims and their families? Wasn’t Mohammed Akhlaq a member of our house, too? Weren’t all those, too, who were lynched in the name of cow protection? Or have violence and murder ceased to be crimes if they are committed by the majority members of our house against its minority members?

Until 2014, we at least had the same criminal laws for all members of our house, and they were applied equally, effectively or ineffectively, against all. In the 75th year of our house being freed from alien rule, we were also told that it is okay for certain sanskari members of our house to gang-rape and mass murder certain other members of our house!

Yes, there should be a uniform civil law for all. But it cannot be made by imposition, by inciting hate and strife, or by making it an election-winning gimmick. If the heads of the house are seen and heard constantly spewing venom on one set of members of the house, what credibility will their proposal for a neutral code of law for all have? As Gandhi would have advised, intentions must be pure and be seen to be pure.

When your house is being burned down by hatred, you don’t pour petrol on it. What you do is, you do everything possible to douse the fire, especially if you are the head of the house and are responsible for keeping it intact.

Equally, you don’t build a house and make it a home for all by belittling its elders and founding fathers; you don’t build a house by building up an army of trolls to spread lies and hatred; you don’t build a house by constantly claiming that you are the only one working for it and everybody else is working against it.

The head of a house can mouth all the Vasudaiva Kutumbakam stuff he wants on the world stage, but nobody will believe him if he doesn’t treat his own house as home for all its members.

Imagine a situation in which your house is in danger of being burned by climate change; the members of your house are jobless and you are not able to provide them livelihoods; the glacier that supplies water to your house is melting fast and you won’t have enough water soon for the house; one part of the house has been burning and bleeding for nearly two months and you are unable to put a stop to it; the borders of your house have been breached by the enemy and you are unable to beat them back, and in this situation, the heads of the house are busy making members of the house hate and fight against each other. How can this house run?