A fashion show on March 7 during Ramzan caused an outrage among Kashmiri Muslims. Our sensitivities have been hurt, they said, because Muslim-majority Kashmir cannot tolerate obscenities in the name of tourism promotion – “that too during this holy month” the chief minister of the state, Omar Abdullah, filled in.
I think it is us, the ones who truly cherish our Constitution, who have been tolerating the ideological impositions and moral coercions of petulant groups in the name of religious sensitivities for much too long.
It is as if our Constitution and its emphatic stress on individual rights is merely a laminated picture frame for the wall to camouflage our parochial selfishness and, at opportune times, used to embellish the claim that India is the mother of democracy. It is tiring and frustrating.
There ought to be a bar on personal offence that befits a human adult. Sure, that’s just me spouting my personal opinion – which, by the way, ought to be protected in a democracy bound by a Constitution that accords individual rights. That is the point.
In a democracy, a group cannot supersede an individual. No one forced the Muslims observing Ramzan to watch the fashion show or participate in it. No one forced the viewers of Ranveer Allahabadia to engage in the prurient activities he joked about. No one forced the murderous Hindu vigilante to sell or eat beef.
The moral righteousness of a group is irrelevant in a democracy because it negates the core ideal of individual rights – it was disappointing to see that even the courts decided to preach morality to Allahabadia rather than make a reasonable legal argument.
As a woman, this lack of confidence in an adult individual’s ability to think for themselves is even more perturbing. The “love jihad” trope is the most patronising and misogynistic insult to ever come by. It assumes that adult women are brainless automatons who cannot decide for themselves whom they want to marry.
A similar paternalistic regulation, under the Uniform Civil Code, mandates live-in couples of Uttarakhand to go through tedious permissions and form-filling before they can cohabit. These are adults who are deemed capable of choosing a political leader at the ballot box but not capable enough to choose their life partner.
Sacred scriptures in Hinduism and Islam that question the competence of women (“The mind of a woman brooks not discipline, Her intellect hath little weight”) or that “Men are in charge of women, because Allah made the one of them to excel the other” are some of the many archaic maxims in religion that we refuse to abandon.
Our Constitution that champions dignity (of all), therefore, stands incongruous with a society that cherishes the honour (of a few).
When groups impose their ideology over individuals, be it through legislation or moral coercion, even democracies can precariously edge towards tyranny. In his exposition on individual liberties, John Stuart Mill had red flagged the dominance of the majority in a democracy: freedom was no less at risk from a newly empowered many, than from an absolute monarch.
Former Chief Justice of India Justice Dipak Misra similarly said, “Although in a democracy, the government is elected by the majority, individual rights cannot be dented by any kind of majoritarian social philosophy.”
Remember that the “majority” is not merely the numerically dominant group. It is the group that holds more power relative to another group – this is called sociological dominance. The numerical dominance of Hindus in India had never assumed a despotic character until the rise of Hindutva, an ideology that champions the honour and interests of a select group of people (who happen to be numerically strongest).
The case of Jammu and Kashmir is different: Hindus are certainly dominant because they are numerically strong in India, but when they live in a minority state, such as Jammu and Kashmir, they are correspondingly weaker and can be subjugated.
Upper-caste dominance works in the same fashion. Although numerically weak, Brahmins hold an upper-hand in how institutions are run, how social norms play out.
Egalitarianism in the Constitution of India can disband the skewed power game played by dominant groups, if we allow it. Religious maxims that defend interests of a group lie at cross purposes with constitutional rights that support individual freedoms. It is unfortunate that time and again we have chosen the former.
Raheel Dhattiwala is a sociologist.
