Police investigation of Sanal Edamaraku for debunking a “miracle” at a church is a crime against the Constitution.
Early in March, little drops of water began to drip from the feet of the
statue of Jesus nailed to the cross on the church of Our Lady of
Velankanni, down on to Mumbai's unlovely Irla Road. Hundreds began to
flock to the church to collect the holy water in little plastic bottles,
hoping the tears of the son of god would sanctify their homes and heal
their beloved.
Sanal Edamaruku, the eminent rationalist thinker, arrived at the church a
fortnight after the miracle began drawing crowds. It took him less than
half an hour to discover the source of the divine tears: a filthy
puddle formed by a blocked drain, from where water was being pushed up
through a phenomenon all high-school physics students are familiar with,
called capillary action.
For his discovery, Mr. Edamaruku now faces the prospect of three years
in prison — and the absolute certainty that he will spend several more
years hopping between lawyers' offices and courtrooms. In the wake of
Mr. Edamaruku's miracle-busting Mumbai visit, three police stations in
the capital received complaints against him for inciting religious
hatred. First information reports were filed, and investigations
initiated with exemplary — if unusual — alacrity.
Real courage
Mr. Edamaruku isn't the kind to be frightened. It takes real courage, in
a piety-obsessed society, to expose the chicanery of Satya Sai Baba and
packs of lesser miracle-peddlers who prey on the insecurities of the
desperate and gullible. These actions have brought threats in their wake
— but never from the state.
India's Constitution obliges all citizens to develop “scientific temper,
humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform”. India's laws, though,
are being used to persecute a man who has devoted his life to doing
precisely that.
Like dozens of other intellectuals and artists, Mr. Edamaraku is a
victim of India's god laws — colonial-era legislation obliging the state
to punish those who offend the faith of others. Section 295 of the
Indian Penal Code criminalises the actions of “whoever destroys, damages
or defiles any place of worship, or any object held sacred by any class
of persons”. Its sibling, Section 295A, outlaws “deliberate and
malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class”.
Section 153B goes further, proscribing “any act which is prejudicial to
the maintenance of harmony between different religious, racial, language
or regional groups or castes or communities”. Alarmingly, given the
sweeping generalities in which these laws are written, truth is not an
admissible defence.
In the decades since independence, these laws have been regularly used
to hound intellectuals and artists who questioned religious beliefs. In
1993, the New Delhi-based progressive cultural organisation, Sahmat,
organised an exhibition demonstrating that there were multiple versions
of the Ramayana in Indian culture. Panels in the exhibition recorded
that in one Buddhist tradition, Sita was Ram's sister; in a Jain
version, she was the daughter of Ravan. Even though the exhibits drew on
historian Romila Thapar's authoritative work, criminal cases were filed
against Sahmat for offending the sentiments of traditionalist Hindus.
Punjab has seen a rash of god-related cases, mainly involving Dalit-led
heterodoxies challenging the high traditions of the Akal Takht. In 2007,
police filed cases against Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, the head of the
syncretic Saccha Sauda sect, for his purportedly blasphemous use of Sikh
iconography. Earlier, in 2001, similar charges were brought against
Piara Singh Bhaniarawala, after he released the Bhavsagar Granth, a religious text suffused with miracle stories.
Islamic chauvinists have shown the same enthusiasm for the secular
state's god laws as their Sikh and Hindu counterparts. Earlier this
year, FIRs were filed against four writers who read out passages from
Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses — a book that is wholly legal
in India. Fear of Islamic neo-fundamentalists is pervasive, shaping
cultural discourse even when its outcomes are not as dramatic as Mr.
Rushdie's case. In 1995, writer Khalid Alvi reissued Angaarey — a
path-breaking collection of Urdu short works banned in 1933 for its
attacks on god. The collection's most-incendiary passages were censored
out. India's feisty media didn't even murmur in protest after the
magazine India Today was proscribed by Jammu and Kashmir in 2006
for carrying a cartoon with an image of the Kaaba as one among a
metaphorical pack of political cards.
Even religious belief, ironically enough, can invite prosecution by the
pious. Last year, the Kannada movie actress, Jayamala, was summoned
before a Kerala court, along with astrologer P. Unnikrishna and his
assistant Reghupathy, to face police charges that she had violated a
taboo against women in the menstruating age from entering the Sabrimala
temple.
For the most part, judges have shied away from condoning criticism of
the pious, perhaps fearful of being held responsible for public
disorder. In 1958, the Supreme Court heard litigation that grew out of
the radical politician, E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker's decision to break a
clay idol of Ganesha. Lower courts had held, in essence, that the idol
was not a sanctified object. The Supreme Court differed, urging the
lower judiciary “to pay due regard to the feelings and religious
emotions of different classes of persons with different beliefs,
irrespective … of whether they are rational or otherwise”.
‘Insult to religion'
Earlier, in 1957, the Supreme Court placed some limits on 295A saying it
“does not penalise any and every act of insult to or attempt to insult
the religion”. Instead, it “only punishes the aggravated form of insult
to religion perpetrated with deliberate and malicious intention” (emphasis added). The court shied away, though, from the key question, of what an insult to religion actually was.
Hearing an appeal against the Uttar Pradesh government's decision to confiscate Naicker's contentious Ramayana,
the Supreme Court again ducked this issue. In 1976, it simply said “the
law fixes the mind of the Administration to the obligation to reflect
on the need to restrict and to state the grounds which ignite its
action”. “That is about all”, the judges concluded.
That hasn't, however, been all. In 1998, the Supreme Court upheld Karnataka's decision to ban P.V. Narayanna's Dharmakaarana,
an award-winning re-reading of the Hindu saint, Basaveshwara. In 2007,
the Bombay High Court similarly allowed Maharashtra to ban R.L. Bhasin's
Islam, an aggressive attack on the faith. There have been
several other similar cases. In some, the works involved were
scurrilous, even inflammatory — but the principles established by courts
have allowed State governments to stamp out critical works of
scholarship and art.
Dangers ahead
Indians have grappled with these issues since at least 1924, when Arya
Samaj activist Mahashe Rajpal published the pamphlet that led the state
to enact several of the god laws. Rangila Rasul — in Urdu, ‘the
colourful prophet' —was a frank, anti-Islam polemic. Lower courts
condemned Rajpal to prison. In the Lahore High Court, though, Justice
Dalip Singh argued that public outrage could not be the basis for legal
proscription: “if the fact that Musalmans resent attacks on the Prophet
was to be the measure [of legal sanction]”, he reasoned, “then an
historical work in which the life of the prophet was considered and
judgment passed on his character by a serious historian might [also]
come within the definition”.
In 1927, when pre-independence India's central legislative assembly debated the Rangila Rasul
affair, some endorsed Justice Singh's message. M.R. Jayakar likened
religious fanaticism to a form of mental illness, and suggested that
those who suffer from it be segregated “from the rest of the community”.
This eminently sane suggestion wasn't, however, the consensus: the god
laws were expanded to expressly punish works like Rangila Rasul.
Perhaps Indians can congratulate themselves that the god laws have not
been used to persecute and kill religious dissenters, as the
ever-expanding blasphemy laws which sprang up in Pakistan. Mr.
Edamaruku's case ought to make clear, though, just where things are
inexorably headed. If Indians wish to avoid the fate of the dystopia to
the country's west, its citizens desperately need to accept the right of
critics to attack, even insult, what they hold dear.
In 864 CE, the great physician, Abu Bakr Muhammad Ibn Zakaria al-Razi,
wrote: “The miracles of the prophets are imposters or belong to the
domain of pious legend. The teachings of religions are contrary to the
one truth: the proof of this is that they contradict one another. It is
tradition and lazy custom that have led men to trust their religious
leaders. Religions are the sole cause of the wars which ravage humanity;
they are hostile to philosophical speculation and to scientific
research. The alleged holy scriptures are books without values”.
Following a rich scholarly life, and a tenure as director of the
hospital in Baghdad patronised by the caliph Abu al-Qasim Abd 'Allah,
al-Razi died quietly at his home in Rey, surrounded by his students. In
modern India, his thoughts would have led him to a somewhat less
pleasant end.
The Hindu
No comments:
Post a Comment