Title: In Bad Faith
Author: Editorial
Publication: The Times
of India
Date: January 24, 2000
Gujarat could be an
independent Republic, judging by the ease and regularity with which those
administering it are able to announce and implement projects that have
been avowedly renounced by their counterparts ruling at the Centre. The
BJP government in the state has done its determined best to undo every
single claim of the BJP bosses about having adapted themselves to the needs
of a modem and forward-looking nation of the new millennium. Indeed, the
BJP in Delhi has merely to talk about its commitment not to bring back
its divisive agenda for Mr Keshubhai Patel in Gujarat to rush up with a
declaration that confirms the opposite. The latest in the series is the
proposed move to identify government employees who may have converted to
a different religion. This is disturbing, to say the least. The freedom
to adopt, practise and preach a religion is a fundamental right guaranteed
by our Constitution. From this it follows that religion is not the business
of the state. What God a person worships is between him and his maker;
no one, certainly not the government, has a right to intrude in this sacred
and intensely personal communion. As Thomas Paine said in The Age of Reason,
“My own mind is my own church”. The political necessity of separating the
state and the church is based on the premise that without this divide the
ruling order of the day will assume a divine right to justify whatever
it seeks to impose on the people. This is, in essence, a monarchical principle
opposed to the very spirit of democracy and republicanism.
Were a public spirited
citizen to take the Gujarat government to court, the verdict without doubt
will be ‘guilty’, for what Mr Patel is contemplating goes against the letter
and spirit of the Constitution. Yet, even that is unlikely to worry the
chief minister. For him and those in his government, religion has for sometime
now been a matter for the sangh parivar to decide. In the past two years,
Gujarat has seldom been out of the headlines - not for any advances it
has made in the sphere of public service but for allowing sectarian activities
to have free play on its soil. What began in a small way as a campaign
against artists, beauty pageants and MNCs has since taken the shape of
a full-fledged hate agenda against the Christian community; the violence
in the Dangs would seem to be only the most visible manifestation of what
has by now become a pattern. Other states might have gone into celebratory
mode at the end of the millennium, but tensions wracked Gujarat with the
VHP choosing Christmas day for performing the shilanyas of a temple in
a Christian majority locality. Mercifully, a postponement was worked out
which averted a full-blown crisis. That hasn’t changed things for the better
though, as is evident from the state government’s decision to allow its
employees to enrol in the RSS. Mr Patel himself turned up at a subsequent
RSS function in full khaki gear. Worse, Union home minister L K Advani
was in attendance. Mr Advani cannot talk of sidelining Hindutva and at
the same time hobnob in public with the RSS. Mr Advani and others must
realise that the business of Gujarat is business, not religion. They must
do this for Gujarat’s sake - a state that once produced the best business
brains.
