The proposal by the Hindu Rashtra Samvidhan Nirmal Samiti has been troubling for those of us who are firmly committed to the socialist, secular values enshrined in the Constitution of India.

The 25-member committee of scholars is reported to have prepared a 501-page Hindu constitution. It draws inspiration from the Ramayana, the rules and teachings of Krishna, the Manusmriti and Chanakya’s Arthashastra, news reports say.

The draft has been prepared by scholars of Sanatan Dharma belonging to the Banaras Hindu University, Sampurnanand Sanskrit University in Varanasi and the Central Sanskrit University in New Delhi

What are we exactly opposing? Often, the debate becomes an argument between supporters of Bharatiya Janata Party and supporters of the Congress.

I think the debate should be around how best India’s Constitution can serve to protect the lives and livelihoods of India’s people. After all, the people are sovereign in a democracy.

Workers’ protests

However, the vast majority of the people of India are facing a future where they will have no jobs, no way to look after their aged parents or provide education to their children. We are witnessing the rapid developments in technology where jobs are being deleted and people are becoming redundant.

This is the daunting future and they are living on the edge of an abyss. How would the Hindu constitution save the people from a jobless future?

Take, for instance, the small group of workers at the Swiggy Instamart store at West Delhi’s Subhash Nagar, who have been protesting against the payment policies of the company. They are members of App Karamchari Ekta Union affiliated to the All India Central Council of Trade Unions.

The President of the Union, Apoorva Sharma said that the condition of the gig workers is precarious. She said that according to studies, one worker dies every week delivering products. The pressure on the delivery workers is leading to stress and anxiety at unimaginable levels.

A Niti Aayog report published in 2022 estimated that India had nearly 7.7 million gig workers in 2021. The report, titled India’s Booming Gig and Platform Economy, projected that the number of gig workers in India will rise to 23.5 million by 2030. A government official estimated in Outlook Business that the current number of gig workers may be around 20 million.

The Hindutva lobby claims that it is the protector of all Hindus as a people. But it ignores the fact that workers – the majority of whom are Hindu – protesting across the country are wondering what kind of future lies ahead.

On January 5, for instance, non-permanent workers of Maruti Suzuki formed a union to demand permanent jobs. They planned to stage a peaceful protest on January 30, a day before their case was to come up before the Labour Court in Gurgaon.

All these workers were between the ages of 18 and 26. All of them had worked in Maruti Suzuki plants as temporary workers but done the same work as permanent workers. However, their wages were far lower than permanent workers.

While Maruti Suzuki management was sponsoring the Jaipur Literature Festival, the police were herding the protesting workers into buses and seizing the bamboo shelter with their clothes, their flags, placards, utensils and even two motorcycles.

How can Hindu nationalists justify the fact that a Japanese multinational company sponsoring our literature treats our worker-citizens in this manner?

It is even more insulting because in Japan, a law was passed in 2024 to regulate fixed-term employment contracts of the kind that are being offered to Maruti Suzuki workers. In India, however, they can freely throw out workers.

While the company’s top manager in India gets an annual salary of more than Rs 5 crore, temporary workers in the plant get barely Rs 30,000.

This skewed model of development has left millions of workers on the edge.

Fundamental rights

The most important part of our present Constitution is Part III, which guarantees the fundamental rights of every citizen (and to some extent, even non-citizens living within the boundaries of India).

But Hindutva supporters want to scrap the Constitution because they claim it is anti-Hindu.

They forget that our Constitution was largely a product of members of the Constituent Assembly whose members overwhelmingly were practising Hindus. They chose in the midst of the violent Partition to give our country a secular constitution.

The consensus was that it would be wiser to have a secular polity and be a beacon of hope for the entire Third World, which had been so violently divided by colonial powers.

What would be the freedoms and rights guaranteed in a Hindu constitution?

I had occasion to discuss this question with Professor NR Madhav Menon (1935-2019), who is considered by some as the father of modern Indian legal education. He invited me to evolve the first course on human rights for the National Law School of India University in Bengaluru in the 1990s.

Menon said he would like me to evolve a human rights course that would be “Indian” and not “Western”. I was clear that human rights discourse was a powerful tool in the hands of imperialism. Much the way that the Bible had been used to justify colonialism, slavery and racism by colonial powers, human rights had been used to justify wars, interventions by the US and its Western allies to interfere in the affairs of nearly every Third World country.

However, Menon wanted me to evolve a Hindu human rights discourse. After all there is the Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the Islamic Council of Europe in 1981. There was also the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam in 1990.

Why not a Hindu Declaration of Human Rights?

That is the question I struggled with. I realised that Menon, like so many, had conflated “Hindu” with “India”.

Lessons from the Mahabharata

Hinduism is not a monolithic philosophy. Let us take the example of the Mahabharata. There are multiple views on rights and duties and how would we interpret these in the light of contemporary values. Would we justify polyandry? In many ways Vidura, the uncle of both the Kauravas and the Pandavas, stood for broadly what we would call principles of natural justice. He strongly protested against humiliation of Draupadi, the wife of the Pandavas, in open court. I think he is the strongest proponent of human rights.

Vidura did not look upon women as the absolute property of their husband but how would the Hindu nationalists of today deal with women’s rights? I do not think Vidura is their model.

That is why I suggested to Menon that I should teach a course on the Mahabharata from a human rights perspective. The Mahabharata has so many examples of characters facing dilemmas that in terms of modern jurisprudence are very like conflict of rights. However, the conflicts are resolved in favour of the powerful, the dominant castes.

And the sacred text of the Hindus, the Bhagwad Gita is an inspiring book on the pointlessness of wars. At the end of the Mahabharata, no one won. All were defeated.

I was quite excited about interpreting the stories to support the rights of women, Dalits and Adivasis. It was not an original idea: many had done it before me but not from a legal or human rights perspective. Irawati Karve’s book Yuganta is a good example.

In the end, though, Menon said it would be better if I stuck to a course on human rights from a Third World perspective.

Instead of discussing a Hindu constitution, it would be far better if we could have a national debate on how millions of our fellow citizens could be protected not by the wisdom of our sacred texts but by developing the best laws and jurisprudence to safeguard India’s people from poverty, exploitation by foreign companies or foreign powers and empower them with rights and guarantees.

Nandita Haksar is the co-author along with Anjali Deshpande of Japanese Management Indian Resistance: The Struggle of the Maruti Suzuki Workers Speaking Tiger, 2023.