An Insult to Secularism

A man named Dr. Praveen Bhai Togadia intended to speak at a public function in Mangalore on 13th March 2003 and did. Not many people might have noticed it, but the saviors of secularism did not think so. Mere announcement of the proposed speech gave sleepless nights to the state machinery.
It is said that the pen is mightier than the sword. The pen, however, kills through words. Our passionate secularists believed that it made no difference whether these words were in the written form or the spoken. So to save the people from a possible law and order problem, or more crudely, from yet another RIOT, the Additional District Magistrate by an order dated 7th February 2003 restrained the said man from entering the district. The man himself was an adamant one- he went to the High Court. After all his Right to Slay nay Right to Speak was challenged. The Court set aside the order by glossing over “the basic requirements by saying that the people of the locality where the meeting was to be organized were sensible and not fickle minded to be swayed by the presence of any person in their midst or by his speeches.”So the man spoke. And lo! Nothing much happened. May be our saviors read too much into the might of words.
That’s only a part of the story, no matter how much you wish that was all. News channels debated the “issue” for weeks; columns and columns of printed space were dedicated to the possible threat to secularism that never proved to be. As if it were not enough, the judiciary breathed life into the dead issue, thanks to its perennial delays. Much to the relief of our saviors, the Supreme Court disapproved of the High Court’s opinion.
“Consider what you think justice requires and decide accordingly. But never give your reasons; for your judgment will probably be right, but your reasons will certainly be wrong.”
May be not much is questionable as far as the interpretation of the Apex court of the relevant sections of the Criminal Procedure Code is concerned. But wherever it touches the realms of social behavior and the requirements of our secular democracy, it slaps the citizens on their face. And if that is unintentional, may be they went into too many reasons.
“No person, however big he may assume or claim to be, should be allowed, irrespective of the position he may assume or claim to hold in public life to either act in a manner or make speeches which would destroy secularism recognized by the constitution of India, 1950”.
On a plain reading two conclusions can be drawn from these remarks. First that our secular roots can be destroyed by mere speeches and second that any one ‘irrespective of the position he may assume or claim in public life’ is capable of destroying it. Is it a mere overstatement? Hopefully it is and is unintentional.
Restraining a man from making a speech on grounds that it may destroy the very fabric of our secularism is a contradiction in terms. For if one speech of a man with credentials to his name as Togadia carries can bend our secular society to its knees, then there is not much to be destroyed. And if it does not make a difference, those acting to restrain it, in effect, strain our secular beliefs much more than any such speech ever can.
“Any speech or action which would result in ostracism of communal harmony would destroy all those high values which the constitution aims at.” This is nothing but the fear within us worded perfectly by Justice Pasayat. By making an issue out of a proposed speech by someone without any standing in public life, by allowing the issue to not only bother the highest judicial body of the country but to be accepted by it as a potential danger “to all those high values” which we stand for, we have only acknowledged the presence of this fear. The fear of existence of that which we have done everything to deny. The fear that each one of us is waiting for a ventilation of the hatred we have carried all these years against our fellow citizens, because they spell the almighty differently.
I do not claim that such fear exists in real. But I do feel that our reaction to a non-issue like this testifies to its existence. To falsify it, we need do nothing. We need to not react. To react would be to insult the concept of secularism.