The disenchantment with the secular ideal

The secular ethos envisaged in the Constitution should be the foundation for governing India

- Yamini Aiyar

On December 12, through an interim order, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court, led by the current Chief Justice of India Sanjiv Khanna, delivered a brief respite against the rising tide of communalism. The bench has temporarily barred trial courts from admitting petitions and passing "effective orders" allowing surveys in cases related to the Places of Worship Act, 1991 until the validity of the 1991 law is determined. In so doing, the Supreme Court has put a temporary lid on the Pandora's box opened by former Chief Justice Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud's observations in the Gyanvapi mosque case that merely allowing a "survey" did not violate the Places of Worship Act.

But this respite may well be short-lived. Open majoritarianism and shrill bigotry are now the dominant culture of our polity. We are allowing this to transform us from a society that, in its founding moment, audaciously attempted to build a sense of civicness on the basis of mutual respect and tolerance bound by constitutional values of secularism into one that has fallen prey to insecure, aggressive pettiness. The plethora of petitions to examine whether temples stood where mosques do and reinterpret history are an outcome of this. The violence in Sambhal after the survey team arrived in late November is just a fleeting glimpse of what could lie ahead. To confront this malaise, we desperately need to restore our secular ethos. The real tragedy is that secularism today has very few champions.