Constitutional Farce - (Indolink.Com, 25/09/2002)

-- By Dasu Krishnamoorty

More people of minority status remained in India than those who chose to make Pakistan their home in 1947. They remained as part of India trying to come to terms with the new environment of insecurity and distrust that partition had created. They were almost successful in emotionally accepting the emerging communal realities of the post-partition era. But the constitution-makers frustrated that process by segregating them and conferring on them a new identity based on religion, a total travesty of secularism. The articles on minorities have separated them forever from the mainstream.

This laid the foundations for the communal divide and the consequent fires of religious conflicts raging eternally like Ravana´s pyre. Every political party has become now a fuel depot ready to supply at short notice the wherewithal for fratricidal arson. All those communal riots, Babri demolition, Bombay blasts and the murderous fracas that followed, Godhra, Gujarat and Kashmir are all episodes of the great constitutional epic our forefathers have authored.

In the dictionary of its prophets, secularism is as amorphous as mercury, amenable, or shall we say vulnerable, to myriad interpretations. It exempts a minority religious denomination from singing Vande Mataram because they do not subscribe to the idea of a nation. The magic of secularism permits you to break civic laws, traffic laws, in short violate the Constitution. Now we are a nation (are we?) of Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Zoroastrians and Jews and seldom Indians. To do justice to certain sections, it was necessary to disintegrate the majority community into a few thousand castes. This is what the Article 30 community is now eyeing.

Article 30 converts (conversion is a right) minorities into holy cows and cows are revered in this country. That is what the Congress government in Assam is doing. It has appointed a committee to see if OBC (other backward classes) status can be conferred on minorities in the state. This is only a formality and a prelude to translate the idea into reality. Academicians of uncertain IQ are now worried that the statistics gathered by state agencies do not clearly show how backward the minorities are.

Since secularism confers privileges on minorities, vast sections of the society marginalised by discriminatory articles in the basic document are now wrenching by ingenious means those rights making the minorities a privileged community. The Ramakrishna Mission was the first to do it, though unsuccessfully, declaring that its adherents were non-Hindu and therefore it was entitled to rights enjoyed by minority educational institutions. The Jains also tried in vain to do it. Now, there is almost a stampede by victims of discrimination to be considered as minority groups.

Naipaul´s million mutinies you see today are the result of that clutch of fratricidal articles in the Constitution, all intended to usher in social change. In Andhra Pradesh, groups denied the benefits of education are converting to Christianity to claim royal front-door entry into minority educational institutions. The State Government referred to the Supreme Court the curious case of "baptism for admissions," showing how certain groups are cleverly skirting, through conversions, provisions denying admissions to private unaided "minority" institutions.

An 11-member SC Bench is now hearing arguments on the crucial question of definition of a minority under Article 30. The Special Leave Petition (SLP) the AP Government has filed has a bearing on the issues the apex court is seized with. The SC Bench is hearing a clutch of petitions that deal with how minority institutions should be administered. According to the Andhra Pradesh government, in most of the cases, candidates obtain conversion certificates just before the admission process begins, solely for the purpose of admission into B.Ed. courses.

An enquiry the Education Secretary to the State Government conducted into the administration of three B.Ed. minority institutions showed that all the 110 candidates admitted in 1999-2000 to the Vivekananda College of Education, Kandukur in Prakasam district, claimed minority status on the basis of conversion certificates. The secretary´s report said that all the members of the college committee originally belonged to Hindu Kamma community and baptised themselves on 15 April 1997. It is interesting to note that the VCE (which is now a minority institution) committee members changed their religion five years after they had registered the college on 26 October 1992.

Another case: 56 students gained admission to the Trinity College of Education, Peddapally in Karimnagar district. Only 21 of them stated in the entrance test form that they were Christians. The remaining 35 became Christians during the admission period. Another big batch of 47 students played the baptism trick to enter the Indur College of Education, Bodhan, Nizamabad district.

It seems there is nothing in law to prevent such conversions and to reject certificates produced as proof of change in religious status. Victims of constitutional discrimination have now found a way of frustrating the objective of the article granting freedom to religious minorities to administer their own institutions. How do secularists deal with this situation? Are they not glad that minorities are gaining strength due to these conversions? The church must welcome this comical turn because more people will embrace the faith now and, luckily, the conversions are voluntary.

Skewed secularism is now hoist with its own petard. The Andhra Pradesh Government affidavit argues that this is an exploitation of the student community by minority educational institutions for personal gains and a denial of seats to genuine and ´traditional´ Christians. "The spirit of establishing a minority educational institution under the provisions of Article 30 of the Constitution of India, is thus violated," it said.

Meanwhile, acting on the basis of news reports about the conversion of some Sikh families to Christianity in Bhilai, National Commission for Minorities (NCM) vice-chairperson Tarlochan Singh has written to Christian leaders ‘‘to desist from this activity to avoid tension between two minority communities.’’ He wrote to the president of the National Council of Churches in India H G Varghese Marcoorilos and president of the Catholic Bishop Council of India Vincent M Concessao:

‘‘Conversion is a serious issue with all communities and there has already been tension between various communities in India in the recent past because of this. We do not want that the two minority communities, Sikhs and Christians, should now try to make efforts to denounce each other and try to get numerical strength through conversions."

Another primeval article of the Constitution places casteism on a pedestal. As a result, Rajputs and Brahmins in Rajasthan want to join the ranks of those advantaged social groups that enjoyed state patronage four decades more than the original ten years the Constitution intended. No party has the courage to end this discriminatory regime. It is a free for all now.