Supreme Court order a beacon of solidarity

It’s as if a heavy grey curtain has been swept aside, and sunlight has come streaming in.

The Supreme Court’s recent order staying all disputes under the Places of Worship Act 1991 is more than a ray of hope in these conflict-ridden times. It brings back the promise of harmony that formed the basis of the Act, which was passed in times as divisive as today. By unequivocally asserting the supremacy of the highest court, it leaves no room for attempts to overwhelm the lower judiciary with petition after petition.

For those in Maharashtra this order is doubly welcome. Voters here are still to process the wholly unexpected Assembly election results. It wasn’t just the overwhelming mandate that the ruling Maha Yuti received, a mandate not dreamt of even by it, as Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Ajit Pawar admitted. Such surprise mandates have happened before. What’s troubling is the way this mandate was won.

The Maharashtra campaign was fought by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on an unambiguously communal pitch. The election was projected as a dharmayudh by Devendra Fadnavis, BJP’s tallest state leader. Such language was common when Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray dominated the state’s politics. But even in his time, its use in election campaigns declined after 1989, when Shiv Sena MLA Ramesh Prabhu, elected to the Assembly in 1987, was disqualified by the Bombay High Court (a verdict upheld by the Supreme Court in 1995), for having used religion to lure voters, a corrupt practice under the Representation of People Act, 1951. Thackeray, who was also banned from contesting elections or voting for six years, used the term more in his party newspaper Saamna. Dharmyudh became his leitmotif during the post-Babri masjid demolition riots in Mumbai.

But an election is not a communal riot where law and order has been compromised. Here was Fadnavis (the current chief minister was then deputy chief minister) exhorting the majority community to wage a holy war by voting for his party, to counter the alleged vote jihad of the minority community.

The latter term was coined by the BJP to single out Muslims as the only reason for its humiliating loss in the Lok Sabha polls in Maharashtra, ignoring the fact that all those opposed to the BJP voted en bloc for the I.N.D.I.A. collective.

It was bad enough that the Congress or other opposition parties did not complain about Fadnavis’ communal references to the Election Commission of India. Worse was Fadnavis interpreting his electoral victory as a sign that the voters had accepted his idea that the election was a holy war.

When a chief minister is proud that his communal rhetoric divided voters and helped his party’s landslide victory, the future can only be dark for citizens, especially those against whom this rhetoric was used. Muslims got a taste of what’s in store for them within days of the results. A grant to the Maharashtra waqf board, announced before the elections, was cancelled. It’s hardly a coincidence that the board was made the new bogey by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in its election campaign for the BJP.

The second incident that warned us about what lay ahead was the demand by a BJP spokesperson that the Urdu Ghar, being built in the heart of Mumbai’s old Muslim quarter, be converted to an ITI.

This area gave birth to the Khilafat movement, was home to handloom weavers who supported Mahatma Gandhi, and continues to be a hub of Urdu literature. Ironically, Yamini Jadhav, the MLA involved in its construction, belongs to the Shiv Sena (Eknath Shinde) faction, a BJP ally. In the Assembly polls, Jadhav lost to her rival from the Shiv Sena (UBT) in a constituency which has 41 per cent Muslims.

The Shinde-Fadnavis government was marked by hate rallies by Hindutva groups, anti-Muslim statements by BJP MLAs such as Nitesh Rane, renaming of cities, and even assaulting and lynching of Muslims after being falsely being accused of transporting beef.

This time, even before the new Cabinet has been sworn in, vigilantes began evicting Muslim hawkers, and trespassing into masjids during namaz. All this was only to be expected. What’s more worrying is the feeling in the Shiv Sena (UBT) that thanks to the BJP’s incessant propaganda on ‘appeasement’, the Muslim votes cost them dearly, and the party must revert to its original brand of Hindutva.

For Maharashtra’s Muslims, who had turned to Uddhav Thackeray after disillusionment with the ‘secular’ Congress-NCP, the election results spell majoritarian rule and dwindling political support, as indeed they do for all those who believe in secularism. In this darkness, the Supreme Court order is like a beacon of solidarity. It restores faith in the rule of law, in the ideal of communal harmony, and, most importantly, in the Supreme Court.

(Jyoti Punwani is a senior journalist.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.