Veering off-course

Justice Sudip Ranjan Sen seemed to have a load on his mind that included many quaint opinions. He unburdened himself in open court in Guwahati on Wednesday while delivering a verdict on whether an Army recruit was entitled to a domicile certificate. In his 37-page judgment, the judge skimmed the main issue at hand. Instead, he provided a soliloquy on how India’s destiny could have been shaped at Independence, painted a wholly untrue picture of the pre-Mughal power structure — ‘united Hindu kingdom’ — and offered homilies on a new refugee policy for India to PM Modi, and for some strange reason, West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee. He then went on to trash the National Register of Citizens whose progress is being monitored by the Chief Justice of India.

Justice Sen did hedge his statement — ‘since India was divided on the basis of religion, it should have also been declared a Hindu country’ — by adding that the country was now secular. Justice Sen, a Bengali himself, would be well aware of how a careless word accentuates the vulnerabilities of the minorities in the Northeast. The ramifications of the judge’s observations have travelled beyond the valleys of the Northeast. They come at a fragile time when the Hindu rashtra ideology is being talked about openly and the religion of the ruling party is sought to be projected as state religion. Judges need to know better.

India was not pushed towards becoming a secular state. It was the need of the times if one country was to be created out of the parts that had willingly chosen to remain behind. Led by Gandhi and ably assisted by Nehru, Patel, Maulana Azad and many others, India self-consciously opted for a state that was free from religious and communal biases. Its aberrations and drawbacks need to be removed by working on secularism to the mutual satisfaction of both the minorities and the majority. Throwing the baby out with the bath water is simply not an option at this juncture.