The Dark Step of Writing Hate into Law

The Hindu     6th January 2021     Save    
QEP Pocket Notes

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.
QEP Pocket Notes