Parental Permission and Adult Love: The Gujarat Notification and the Death of Choice

-Ramphal Kataria

When the State Becomes a Khap: Marriage, Consent, and Constitutional Betrayal

Marriage did not begin as law. It began as life.

Long before statutes, registrars, or governments, human relationships evolved organically—through companionship, sexual intimacy, survival, and shared responsibility. Anthropological scholarship consistently shows that early human societies functioned without the rigid, institutionalized form of marriage familiar today. Kinship was often communal rather than nuclear, sexual relationships were relatively fluid, and child-rearing was a collective responsibility rather than the exclusive obligation of biological parents. What we now recognize as marriage is therefore not a biological inevitability, but a historical and social construction.¹

This raises a foundational question:
why did marriage evolve into a formal institution at all?

From Intimacy to Institution

Marriage emerged not to regulate love, but to regulate property, lineage, and power.

The transition from nomadic life to settled agriculture fundamentally altered social organization. With the accumulation of surplus wealth and land ownership came anxieties over inheritance: who would succeed whom, which children were legitimate heirs, and how lineage would be preserved. In this transformation, women’s sexuality and reproductive capacity became central to social regulation. As feminist historian Gerda Lerner demonstrated, the institutionalization of marriage was inseparable from the historical subordination of women and the consolidation of patriarchy.²

Marriage thus shifted from a personal bond to a social contract, increasingly enforced through religion, custom, and later the state. Its functions crystallized around:

controlling sexual relationships,

ensuring patriarchal inheritance,

defining legitimacy of children,

assigning gendered economic and caregiving roles, and

stabilizing social hierarchies

In this sense, marriage became a mechanism of social order, not individual freedom. As anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss observed, marriage historically served as an alliance between groups rather than a union of individuals.³

Why the Law Intervened: Protecting the Vulnerable

Paradoxically, the same institution that enabled control and exploitation eventually required legal intervention to mitigate its harms.

Modern marriage statutes were not enacted to moralize intimacy but to curb abuse: child marriage, polygamy, abandonment, denial of maintenance, and dispossession of women and children. Liberal political theory, particularly John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, justified state intervention not to impose morality but to prevent harm to vulnerable individuals.⁴

This rights-based reorientation transformed marriage from a purely religious or customary arrangement into a legal relationship carrying enforceable entitlements. Indian personal laws across religions gradually absorbed this logic. The Special Marriage Act, 1954, was especially significant: it offered a secular framework permitting marriage across caste, religion, and nationality, grounded solely in adult consent. It was conceived as a liberatory statute, not a surveillance mechanism.

Choice as a Constitutional Value

In India, the right to choose one’s partner is not textually enumerated as a “right to marry,” but it flows directly from Article 21 of the Constitution—the guarantee of life and personal liberty. Over the past two decades, constitutional jurisprudence has made this position unequivocal.

The Supreme Court of India has repeatedly affirmed that adult choice in marriage lies beyond the control of parents, community, or state. In Lata Singh v. State of Uttar Pradesh (2006), the Court upheld inter-caste marriage and condemned familial violence. In Shafin Jahan v. Asokan K.M. (2018), it held that the choice of a life partner is intrinsic to personal liberty. In Shakti Vahini v. Union of India (2018), it declared khap diktats unconstitutional, and in Laxmibai Chandaragi v. State of Karnataka (2021), it emphasized that once two adults consent, the law must protect rather than obstruct their union.

The constitutional message is consistent and unambiguous:
adults are citizens, not subjects of family or community rule.

Khap Panchayats and the Sociology of Control

Why, then, does society resist choice marriages with such ferocity?

Khap panchayats and community councils oppose inter-caste and inter-religious marriages not out of concern for individuals, but out of fear of social dilution. Such marriages threaten endogamy—the core mechanism through which caste reproduces itself. B.R. Ambedkar identified endogamy as the essence of caste, arguing that dismantling it would unravel the caste system itself.⁵ Choice marriage is therefore revolutionary precisely because it undermines hierarchy without overt political mobilization.

This is why it is punished—through violence, ostracism, and moral denunciation.

From Social Khaps to Legal Khaps

What marks the present moment as particularly dangerous is that the state itself is increasingly assuming the role of the khap.

This shift is no longer abstract. It has now taken concrete administrative form. The recent notification issued by the Government of Gujarat, mandating prior parental intimation before the registration of marriages between consenting adults, marks a decisive rupture from constitutional jurisprudence. By converting marriage registration into a site of familial scrutiny, the State has effectively imported the logic of khap panchayats into formal governance. What was once social coercion has now been clothed in bureaucratic legality.

This notification cannot be read in isolation. It forms part of a broader pattern across BJP-ruled states such as Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Haryana, where executive orders and statutes regulating interfaith marriages—popularly branded under the rhetoric of “love jihad”—have institutionalised suspicion over adult consent. The cumulative effect is the transformation of the State into a legal khap, arrogating to itself the power to vet, delay, discourage, and delegitimise marriages of choice.

The Manufactured Panic of “Love Jihad”

At the ideological core of these measures lies the conspiracy theory of “love jihad.” Despite the absence of empirical evidence, judicial findings, or credible data, the narrative persists—mobilized by right-wing organizations to police interfaith intimacy, demonize Muslim men, infantilize women, and legitimize state intrusion into private life.

This is not about protection; it is about control. Political theorist Hannah Arendt’s warning is instructive here: revolutionary rhetoric, once institutionalized, often mutates into conservative authoritarianism.⁶

“At the ideological heart of the Gujarat notification, and similar enactments in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Haryana, lies the manufactured conspiracy of “love jihad.” These laws and notifications operate on a shared presumption: that adult women lack agency, that interfaith intimacy is inherently fraudulent, and that the State must intervene as moral guardian. Despite repeated judicial affirmations that consent is paramount, the narrative persists—amplified by right-wing organisations and legitimised by state action”

Two Yardsticks, One Republic

A stark hypocrisy underlies this moral regime.

Urban elites routinely marry across caste, religion, and nationality with social approval and legal ease. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens confront caste prohibitions, gotra taboos, community violence, police harassment, and bureaucratic obstruction. As legal scholar Upendra Baxi has argued, Indian constitutionalism often protects elite autonomy while disciplining the poor and socially marginal.⁷

Freedom becomes selective; autonomy becomes a privilege rather than a right.

Why Choice Marriages Strengthen Society

Contrary to reactionary claims, choice marriages do not erode social cohesion—they deepen it. They break caste silos, humanize religious difference, and foster everyday solidarities that no state policy can manufacture. Each inter-caste or interfaith marriage becomes a lived assertion of constitutional values.

Ambedkar’s famous observation remains relevant: the progress of a society is measured by the status of its women. The freedom to choose one’s partner lies at the heart of that progress.

Constitution vs. Custom

The Indian Constitution does not exist to preserve social orthodoxy. It exists to transform society. To privilege custom over consent is to invert constitutional morality. When the state demands parental approval for adult marriages, it violates Articles 21, 14, and 19, reinforcing patriarchal and communal control.

A democracy cannot demand a father’s permission at the registrar’s door.

“The Gujarat notification mandating parental intimation before marriage registration exemplifies this inversion of constitutional morality, privileging family authority over individual dignity and substituting constitutional citizenship with patriarchal permission.”

Conclusion

Marriage is a human relationship before it is a legal form. Law exists to protect autonomy, not suffocate it. When governments behave like legal khaps, they betray both history and the Constitution. The Gujarat notification is not an aberration but part of a broader authoritarian drift in which intimacy becomes suspect and autonomy negotiable.

A confident society does not fear love across boundaries.
A constitutional state does not police consent.

To defend choice marriage is to defend India’s plural soul.
To resist moral policing is not rebellion—it is constitutional fidelity.

Footnotes

1. Engels, F. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884).

2. Lerner, G. The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford University Press, 1986).

3. Lévi-Strauss, C. The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Beacon Press, 1969).

4. Mill, J.S. On Liberty (1859).

5. Ambedkar, B.R. Annihilation of Caste (1936).

6. Arendt, H. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).

7. Baxi, U. “The Crisis of the Indian Legal System,” Oxford University Press (1982).

8. Lata Singh v. State of Uttar Pradesh, (2006) 5 SCC 475.

9. Shafin Jahan v. Asokan K.M., (2018) 16 SCC 368.

10. Shakti Vahini v. Union of India, (2018) 7 SCC 192.

11. Laxmibai Chandaragi v. State of Karnataka, (2021) 3 SCC 360.

12. Agnes, F. Law and Gender Inequality (Oxford University Press, 1999).

13. Kannabiran, K. Tools of Justice: Non-discrimination and the Indian Constitution (Routledge, 2012).

From Guardian to Facilitator: India’s Supreme Court and the Normalisation of Power

By Ramphal Kataria

Judicial Courage in America, Judicial Caution in India

“However good a Constitution may be, it is sure to turn out bad if those who are called to work it happen to be a bad lot.”
— B. R. Ambedkar

On February 20, 2026, something increasingly rare occurred in constitutional democracies drifting toward executive dominance: a court said no.

In a 6–3 ruling, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down sweeping global tariffs imposed unilaterally by President Donald Trump, holding that emergency economic powers do not authorise tariff-making. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts reaffirmed a first principle of constitutional governance: taxation belongs to the legislature, not the executive. Justice Neil Gorsuch went further, reminding the Court that unaccountable taxation was among the abuses that triggered the American Revolution itself.

“Emergency powers cannot be allowed to swallow constitutional structure.”

This was not merely a trade dispute. It was a reassertion of separation of powers, the major questions doctrine, and—most importantly—judicial courage.

For India, the judgment should have been more than comparative interest. It should have been a mirror.

A Court Designed to Be Supreme—and One That Hesitates to Act Like It

Few constitutional courts in the world are as textually powerful as the Supreme Court of India.

Article 32 allows citizens direct access for enforcement of fundamental rights—what Ambedkar called “the very soul of the Constitution.”
Article 13 empowers judicial invalidation of unconstitutional state action.
Article 141 makes its law binding on all courts.
Article 50 mandates separation of the judiciary from the executive.

And yet, constitutional supremacy on paper has increasingly translated into institutional caution in practice.

“India’s Supreme Court is constitutionally supreme—but institutionally hesitant.”

Where the U.S. Supreme Court confronted executive overreach early and decisively, India’s apex court has too often deferred, delayed, or domesticated constitutional conflict—allowing executive power to harden into fait accompli.

The difference is not constitutional text. It is constitutional temperament.

Article 370: Federalism Rewritten Through Judicial Deference

The most consequential example is the 2023 ruling upholding the unilateral abrogation of Jammu and Kashmir’s special constitutional status.

The Court accepted executive actions taken under prolonged presidential rule, endorsed retrospective reinterpretations of accession, and treated federal consent as dispensable. A provision meant to manage a sensitive federal compact became a legal pathway for permanent centralisation.

This was not constitutional interpretation—it was constitutional accommodation.

“A Constitution that once restrained power now explains it.”

Contrast this with the U.S. tariff ruling. There, even foreign policy and economic urgency could not substitute for legislative authorisation. In India, by contrast, the Court allowed executive convenience to override federal structure—without even invoking the basic structure doctrine it once used to restrain Parliament itself.

Ayodhya: Law Condemned, Illegality Rewarded

The Ayodhya title judgment is often defended as pragmatic conflict resolution. But constitutional courts do not exist to manage sentiment; they exist to enforce principle.

The Court acknowledged that the demolition of the Babri Masjid was illegal—then nonetheless awarded the disputed land for temple construction. Illegality was condemned rhetorically and rewarded substantively.

“The judgment punished illegality in words and rewarded it in outcome.”

This marked a profound shift—from rights-based adjudication to majoritarian accommodation. Faith inherited the fruits of illegality, and constitutional morality yielded to political closure.

Ambedkar had warned precisely against this temptation: constitutional morality is not natural; it must be cultivated—especially when public sentiment demands otherwise.

Electoral Bonds: Judicial Correction Without Democratic Repair

When the Court finally struck down the Electoral Bonds Scheme in 2024, the verdict was legally sound—and constitutionally incomplete.

For seven years, anonymous corporate funding distorted electoral competition, entrenched inequality, and hollowed out democratic transparency. The Court intervened only after the damage was structurally irreversible, and declined to order restitution or accountability.

“Justice delayed here was not neutral; it reshaped democracy.”

Compare this with the U.S. tariff ruling, where the Court openly contemplated refunds running into hundreds of billions of dollars—recognising that unconstitutional extraction cannot simply be declared unlawful and left uncorrected.

In India, relief was declaratory. Consequences were allowed to stand.

Liberty Deferred: The Normalisation of Pre-Trial Punishment

Nowhere is judicial abdication more visible than in prolonged pre-trial incarceration under anti-terror laws.

The continued incarceration of Umar Khalid—over five years without trial—exposes how Article 21 collapses when courts normalise delay. Bail hearings are adjourned, trials stagnate, and constitutional guarantees become ornamental.

The Court continues to repeat that “bail is the rule, jail the exception.” In practice, the reverse has become routine.

“Liberty survives in doctrine; incarceration governs reality.”

This is not judicial restraint. It is judicial participation in carceral governance.

Delay as Constitutional Method

Judicial delay is often defended as backlog or institutional overload. In constitutional cases, this explanation no longer holds.

Delay has become a mode of governance.

It allows executive actions to harden into irreversible reality.
It converts interim silence into final outcomes.
It avoids accountability by issuing no reasons at all.

Challenges to the Citizenship Amendment Act, electoral roll revisions, and surveillance regimes remain pending while their consequences reshape citizenship and political participation. By the time adjudication arrives—if it arrives—the constitutional injury has already been normalised.

“Delay is the perfect judicial alibi: it changes everything while saying nothing.”

The Article 370 challenge illustrates this perfectly. It was not heard when the injury was reversible. It was decided after statehood dissolved, demographics altered, and restoration became practically unimaginable.

Delay here was not incidental. It was determinative.

Selective Urgency and the Politics of the Docket

The Court insists it does not choose politics. But it undeniably chooses timing—and timing, in constitutional law, is destiny.

It moves swiftly when institutional power or executive validation is at stake.
It moves slowly when minority rights, electoral fairness, or ideological scrutiny are involved.

Hate speech by powerful incumbents is routinely deflected downward. Constitutional scrutiny is politely avoided.

This asymmetry is not accidental. It reflects priorities.

What One Court Remembered—and the Other Forgot

The U.S. tariff ruling rested on three foundational commitments:

Separation of Powers — Core fiscal authority belongs to the legislature.
Major Questions Doctrine — Vast economic consequences require explicit statutory mandate.
Judicial Courage — Courts must enforce limits even against dominant executives.

India’s Supreme Court has too often inverted these principles—treating executive intent as constitutional wisdom and dissent as inconvenience.

The difference is not law. It is will.

Ambedkar’s Warning—and Khanna’s Example

Ambedkar foresaw this danger with chilling clarity: constitutional breakdown rarely occurs through dramatic overthrow. It occurs through institutional acquiescence.

During the Emergency, Justice H. R. Khanna proved that a single judge could save a Constitution—by dissenting when all others yielded.

Today, the tragedy is not absence of precedent. It is absence of resolve.

Conclusion: The Quiet Death of Supremacy

The tragedy is not that India’s Supreme Court sometimes rules in favour of the government. Courts inevitably do.

The tragedy is that it increasingly fails to assert its own supremacy—not over Parliament, but over constitutional meaning itself.

Courts possess neither purse nor sword. Their authority rests entirely on public confidence. When citizens begin to perceive the Supreme Court not as an independent arbiter but as a silent partner in executive consolidation, constitutional democracy enters perilous terrain.

“If the strongest executive in the world can be restrained by his court, India’s crisis is no longer about power—but about judicial will.”

A Constitution does not die when it is amended, ignored, or even violated.
It dies when its guardian decides that waiting is safer than enforcing.

Footnotes

1. In Re: Article 370 of the Constitution of India, (2023) SCC OnLine SC 1478.

2. M. Siddiq (D) Thr. Lrs. v. Mahant Suresh Das, (2019) 18 SCC 1.

3. Association for Democratic Reforms v. Union of India, (2024) SCC OnLine SC 123.

4. Umar Khalid v. State (NCT of Delhi), Bail Orders & Transfer Petitions, 2020–2024.

5. Trump v. United States, 602 U.S. ___ (2026).

6. West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, 597 U.S. 697 (2022).

7. Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952).

8. Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala, (1973) 4 SCC 225.

9. State of Rajasthan v. Balchand, (1977) 4 SCC 308.

10. Constituent Assembly Debates, Vol. VII, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar.

 

When Nationalism Enters the Playing Field, Sport Loses Its Soul

-Ramphal Kataria

Athletes are not diplomats, and cricket grounds are not war rooms

Sport was invented to civilise rivalry. When it is instead conscripted into ideological theatre, it ceases to be sport and becomes spectacle—loud, hollow, and morally vacant.

At a moment when India seeks global leadership in sport and actively presses for cricket’s inclusion in the Olympic Games, its conduct on the cricket field tells a troublingly different story. Handshakes are avoided, trophies refused, courtesies withdrawn—not because rules demand it, but because political signalling now intrudes where sporting ethics once prevailed.

This is not strength. It is short-sightedness.

As Nelson Mandela famously said:

“Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does.”

The Universal Grammar of Sport

The Olympic movement distilled the philosophy of sport into a single proposition: excellence is indivisible from solidarity. The updated Olympic motto—“Faster, Higher, Stronger – Together”—adopted by the International Olympic Committee in 2021, did not dilute competition; it clarified its moral boundary. Achievement, it insists, cannot come at the cost of shared humanity.

Cricket internalised this ethic long before Olympic committees codified it. The Preamble – The Spirit of Cricket, enshrined under the International Cricket Council, explicitly demands respect for opponents, umpires, and the game itself—above the letter of the law.

To play hard is mandatory.
To play hateful is forbidden.

Players Are Human Beings, Not Ideological Props

Athletes are not designed for permanent emotional hostility. Expecting players to perform elite sport while suppressing basic human decency is not patriotism; it is psychological coercion.

Sport allows aggression within boundaries, not perpetual animus. To demand visible disdain—refusal of handshakes, symbolic snubs, performative coldness—is to violate the very objective of play.

That is why moments of instinctive humanity resonate so deeply. When Rohit Sharma and Wasim Akram were seen embracing at the same venue where India had just won, that image eclipsed every statistic. It revealed what spectators intuitively know: people crave reconciliation, not ritualised hostility.

Equally telling was the casual public interaction between Jay Shah, ICC chairman, and Shahid Afridi during the Asia Cup—an exchange no reasonable observer found offensive. Selective outrage, then, is not moral; it is political.

India–Pakistan Cricket: Rivalry Without Enmity

Few rivalries are as intense as India–Pakistan cricket. Yet, paradoxically, few rivalries have produced such deep personal camaraderie among players.

From Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev, and Sachin Tendulkar to Imran Khan, Javed Miandad, Wasim Akram, and Waqar Younis, generations of cricketers have demonstrated that on-field rivalry need not translate into off-field hatred.

The standing ovation for Pakistan after their win in Chennai, the viral image of Virat Kohli tying a Pakistani player’s shoelaces, and the enduring respect between former opponents are not aberrations—they are cricket’s natural order.

As C. L. R. James wrote in Beyond a Boundary:

“What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?”

The Appeal for Imran Khan: Sportsmanship Beyond Borders

The most compelling recent defence of sporting ethics did not come from governments, but from cricketers themselves.

Fourteen former international captains—among them Sunil Gavaskar and Kapil Dev—signed a joint appeal urging the Government of Pakistan to ensure humane medical treatment and dignified detention for former Pakistan captain and prime minister Imran Khan.

Their letter was unambiguous:

“Imran Khan’s contributions to the game are universally admired… Regardless of political perspectives, he holds the honour of having been democratically elected to the highest office in his country. We respectfully urge that he be treated with dignity and basic human consideration.”

This was not politics. It was moral continuity—the extension of cricket’s spirit beyond the boundary rope. To malign such an appeal as “anti-national” is to redefine nationalism as hostility to compassion.

As Albert Camus, himself a goalkeeper, once observed:

“Everything I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football.”

Diplomacy Once Understood Sport—Why Not Now?

India’s own political history offers a corrective.
Atal Bihari Vajpayee, during the Lahore peace initiative, understood cricket as people-to-people diplomacy, not ideological combat. His message to Indian cricketers before the 2004 Pakistan tour—“Khel hi nahi, dil bhi jeetiye”—remains unmatched in moral clarity.

Likewise, the 2005 visit of Pervez Musharraf to watch an India–Pakistan ODI was not frivolity; it was an attempt to thaw history through shared spectatorship.

Contrast this with today’s climate, where even neutral professional decisions—such as the mishandling of issue of Bangladeshi fast bowler Mustafizur Rahman’s IPL engagement—are allowed to spiral into diplomatic embarrassment, contributing to Bangladesh’s boycott of a global event. Sport suffers, fans lose, and politics gains nothing.

The Current Drift: When Pseudo-Nationalism Enters the Field

What we are witnessing today is a rupture.

Refusals of customary handshakes, visible avoidance of basic sporting courtesies, and public snubs—such as declining a trophy from Mohsin Naqvi in his capacity as ACC chairman—are not acts of strength. They are performative hostility, choreographed for domestic political consumption.

This behaviour is particularly alarming because it appears directionless yet deliberate—suggesting political pressure without institutional ownership. The Board of Control for Cricket in India, despite being the world’s most powerful cricket body, seems unwilling or unable to assert the game’s ethical autonomy.

As George Orwell warned:

“Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, and disregard of all rules.”

What we are seeing now is precisely this Orwellian degeneration.

Beyond Cricket: The Pattern Repeats

The same reflexive hostility surfaced when Olympic champion Neeraj Chopra was falsely accused of inviting Pakistan’s Olympic gold medallist Arshad Nadeem to the Neeraj Chopra Classic 2025 in Bengaluru. The manufactured outrage forced a clarification that should never have been necessary.

The most dignified response came not from institutions, but from Chopra’s mother, who remarked with disarming simplicity:

“He is like my son. I am happy.”

That, too, is sport speaking—softly but powerfully.

Tennis had already shown the way. The partnership between Rohan Bopanna and Aisam-ul-Haq Qureshi, celebrated globally as the “Indo-Pak Express”, reached a US Open final and became a symbol of peaceful rivalry without surrender of national pride.

The Central Contradiction

India cannot credibly argue for cricket’s Olympic inclusion while eroding Olympic values at home. The Olympics demand neutrality of play, respect for opponents, and insulation of athletes from political vendetta.

A nation confident in its stature does not fear a handshake.
A civilisation secure in itself does not need to choreograph resentment.

Conclusion: Save Sport from the State

Sport is one of humanity’s last remaining moral commons. To convert it into an arena of pseudo-nationalism is to poison a shared inheritance.

Cricket, in particular, was never meant to extend conflict—it was meant to contain it, ritualise it, and finally dissolve it in mutual respect.

If the spirit of the game is lost, no victory will matter.
And no nation—however powerful—will escape the ridicule of having mistaken hostility for honour.

Selected Footnotes & Sources

1. International Olympic Committee, Olympic Motto Update, 2021.

2. International Cricket Council, Preamble – The Spirit of Cricket.

3. Open letter by former international captains on Imran Khan’s health, reported by The Age (Australia), 2024.

4. Nelson Mandela, Speech at the Laureus World Sports Awards, 2000.

5. George Orwell, The Sporting Spirit, Tribune, 1945.

6. C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary, 1963.

7. Records of India–Pakistan cricket diplomacy, 1999–2005.

8. ATP Tour archives: Bopanna–Qureshi partnership, US Open 2010.

1. 

 

When Faith Replaces Citizenship: The Crisis of the Indian Republic

-Ramphal Kataria

From Republic to Religious State: India’s Dangerous Drift

India did not emerge as a nation in 1947. It emerged as a civilisational compact centuries earlier. What we now call “India” was never a monolith of faith, language, or culture. It was a continuously negotiated coexistence—between Shaiva and Vaishnava, Buddhist and Brahmanical, Sufi and Bhakti, tribal and agrarian, Persianate and Sanskritic. This composite culture was neither accidental nor sentimental; it was forged through interaction, conflict, accommodation, and synthesis.

On October 15, 1947—barely two months after Independence and Partition—India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, wrote to the chief ministers of provinces:

“Whatever the provocation from Pakistan and whatever the indignities and horrors inflicted on non-Muslims there, we have got to deal with this minority in a civilized manner. We must give them security and the rights of citizens in a democratic State.”

This was not merely a humanitarian appeal. It was a statement of constitutional philosophy. Nehru understood that if India responded to Pakistan’s religious nationalism by mirroring it, the Republic would forfeit both its moral legitimacy and its democratic future. Secularism, for Nehru, was not hostility to religion; it was state restraint in matters of faith.

Yet this vision was never uncontested. Even within the Congress, conservative Hindu sentiment existed. As prime minister, Nehru nevertheless worked deliberately to marginalise the forces of Hindutva, represented by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Jana Sangh. History’s irony is that only after his death did these forces begin their steady ascent, culminating in the dominance of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

India, which once hoped to chart a path fundamentally different from its neighbour, is now drawing disturbingly close to Pakistan in the fusion of faith and State, differing only in the identity of the religious majority.

Majoritarianism as Structure, Not Rhetoric

The majoritarian character of contemporary India is no longer anecdotal; it is structural. Of the more than 800 Members of Parliament elected on a BJP ticket across the last three general elections, not one is a Muslim. Under Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, the BJP has consciously constructed a Hindu-only electoral coalition, fighting and often winning elections on the basis of Hindu consolidation alone.

Once power was secured through Hindu-first politics, the sangh parivar moved from mobilisation to social consolidation: the systematic demonisation, criminalisation, and marginalisation of Indian Muslims—and increasingly, Indian Christians. This is not spontaneous prejudice; it is organised othering.

Within living memory, Muslims held cabinet positions, headed the Intelligence Bureau and the diplomatic corps, presided over the Supreme Court, and led the Indian Air Force. Two cities in Modi’s home state once elected Muslim MPs. Today, Muslims are almost entirely absent from positions of public prominence. Working-class Muslims face housing and employment discrimination, routinised humiliation, lynching in the name of cow protection, and bulldozer demolitions masquerading as “law and order.”

Christians, though fewer in number, face parallel targeting—church vandalism, disruptions of Christmas celebrations, and false conversion prosecutions. The message is unmistakable: citizenship is being graded by faith.

Law, Symbol, and Spectacle

Majoritarianism is equally visible on the legal plane. The Citizenship (Amendment) Act introduced religion as a criterion for citizenship for the first time in India’s history, explicitly excluding Muslims. The abrogation of Article 370 cannot be divorced from the fact that Jammu and Kashmir was India’s only Muslim-majority state.

At the symbolic level, the signalling is relentless: saffron robes as executive authority, and the prime minister presiding over the inauguration of a grand Ram temple. These are not benign spectacles. They signal hierarchy and embolden officials to behave as if they are Hindus first and constitutional functionaries later.

Popular culture has been conscripted as well. Bollywood—once a site of composite imagination—is increasingly deployed to portray Muslims as internal enemies and non-Hindus as perpetual outsiders.

Institutional Silence and Electoral Hate

The open avowal of majoritarian bigotry has become routine. Campaign speeches in Assam and elsewhere, particularly by Himanta Biswa Sarma, have led to petitions alleging a sustained pattern of hate speech and incitement against Muslims. That the higher judiciary has largely failed to impose timely restraint is not merely shocking; it is symptomatic of institutional moral exhaustion.

India, in law and politics, in symbol and substance, is thus becoming ever more like Pakistan—except that here Hindus rule over citizens of other faiths.

This Did Not Begin in 2014

Yet to attribute this transformation solely to 2014 would be historically lazy. Hindutva has deep roots—from 19th-century revivalist movements to the Hindu Mahasabha, and the founding of the RSS in 1925. During Nehru’s years it was recessive, not absent.

Its decisive opportunity came through the failures of the post-Nehru Congress. Rajiv Gandhi bears particular responsibility. By overturning the Shah Bano judgment to appease Muslim clerics, and unlocking the Babri Masjid site to placate Hindu hardliners, he legitimised religion as an instrument of governance.

Once religion became statecraft, numerical asymmetry guaranteed that Hindu extremism would dwarf minority extremism. The demolition of the Babri Masjid was not an aberration; it was the logical outcome of this shift. The BJP’s rise—from two seats in 1984 to national dominance within fifteen years—was its political harvest.

Ambedkar’s Diagnosis: Communalism as Structural Tyranny

This trajectory vindicates the warnings of B. R. Ambedkar. Ambedkar rejected the notion that communalism was merely religious misunderstanding. He saw it as a by-product of structural inequality, especially caste.

For Ambedkar, a communal majority is fundamentally different from a political majority. It is permanent, immune to democratic rotation, and therefore a recipe for the tyranny of the majority. This is why he warned that political democracy without social democracy is unsustainable, why he insisted on strict state neutrality in religious affairs, and why he argued that communal conflict often serves as a smokescreen for caste domination.

His insistence that citizens must be “Indians first, Indians last” was a direct rebuke to competitive religious loyalty.

Composite India and Its Dissenters

India’s moral inheritance lies not with majoritarians but with its dissenters. Basavanna rejected ritual hierarchy centuries ago. Jyotirao Phule exposed Brahmanical domination. Periyar dismantled the sanctity of religious authority. The Bhakti-Sufi tradition spoke a shared idiom of devotion and social equality. The communists foregrounded class against communal identity.

They understood a simple truth: religion becomes dangerous when it is mobilised for power.

The Muslim rulers of medieval India were kings, not theologians. Their primary objective was revenue and control, not conversion. To project modern communal identities onto medieval politics is not history; it is ideology disguised as memory.

The Global Record: No Exceptions

The claim of a “civilisational renaissance” collapses under historical scrutiny. Pakistan’s Islamic identity hollowed out democracy and economy alike. Iran’s theocracy destroyed its modernist potential. Sri Lanka’s Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism ignited a civil war that set it back decades. Israel today risks pariah status through theocratic militarism.

Across faiths—Sunni, Shia, Buddhist, Jewish—the lesson is consistent: when religion becomes state ideology, democracy corrodes and human rights shrink. There is no reason to believe Hindus are exempt from this rule.

The Republic at the Brink

India in 2026 stands closer to being a Hindu Pakistan than at any previous moment. Whether this trajectory can be reversed is uncertain. What is certain is this: nations are not made by temples, myths, or majorities, but by equal citizenship.

To abandon that principle is not to revive civilisation—
it is to betray the Republic.

Footnotes

1. Romila Thapar, Cultural Pasts: Essays in Early Indian History – on plurality and debate as civilisational features.

2. Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian – on pluralism as constitutive of Indian identity.

3. Irfan Habib, writings on medieval Indian polity – critique of communal readings of pre-modern history.

4. B. R. Ambedkar, Communal Deadlock and a Way to Solve It – distinction between political and communal majorities.

5. B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste – caste as the structural root of social inequality.

6. Jawaharlal Nehru, Letters to Chief Ministers (October 1947) – minority protection and secular statecraft.

7. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism – “normalisation of cruelty” and routinised injustice.

8. Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism – critique of self-worshipping nations.

9. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies – dangers of moral absolutism and closed societies.

10. Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India – institutionalisation of Hindutva politics.