The Dark Step of Writing Hate into Law

Context: Many recent state ‘laws’ on the slaughter of cattle, marriage, and religious conversions may incite communalism and destroy the long-standing fraternity in everyday lives that have long defined India.

Efforts to promote inter-faith and inter-caste marriages: Historical background -

• Keshub Chandra Sen’s efforts: led to a colonial law allowing people of different backgrounds to marry according to their ‘rites of conscience’.
• The Special Marriage Act, in 1954: Took away the colonial law’s requirement to renounce religion. However, it still allowed the intrusion of the state by demanding notices to put in advance:

Issues with laws of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh on Inter-faith marriages:

• Distorts the framework of our republic: By treating religious communities, instead of individual citizens, as basic entities, unlike the Constitution which treats an individual as basic entity who exercises rights and has obligations.
• Violate the Right to Privacy: which was declared a fundamental right by the Supreme Court in 2017 and state interference was treated as a breach of the basic structure of Constitution.
• Impeding individual’s right to choose her faith without seeking state sanction: As the police, local administration and communal groups and families are given ample time to interfere.
  • In matters of change of profession, nationalities, electoral choices and even political parties, no such interference is brought into play.
  • Clause of demanding notice to be put up before the marriage clause was misused by communal social groups to stop such unions
• Deepening patriarchal mindset: it treats women as honour and property of a particular religious group.
• Compromising social transformation: They put state power and the law itself behind majoritarian communal biases which empower regressive social mores governing marriage and fellowship.

Conclusion: It is for the court to Suo Motu strike these laws down in order to preserve the basic structure of the constitutional edifice.

Anecdote: Price paid by society for writing hate into law -

• In September 1935, when Hitler enacted the Nuremberg Race Laws, it was fear of the Mischling or the German ­ Jewish children of ‘mixed’ descent.
• At 50% Jew and 50% Aryan, they were a threat to Nazi ideas. Closely linked to preventing such marital and sexual unions was the Nazi belief in dodgy eugenics.
• The tragedy was that these laws were not protested enough when they were enacted. They ended up guiding Nazi racial policy for the remaining decade of the Reich.