Tirupati board should have only Hindu employees. ‘Majority’ religion deserves rights too

File photo of Alipiri footpath leading to the Tirupati temple | tirumala.org

It is galling that a fairly commonsensical decision of the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams board, that it will ask non-Hindu employees to either resign or relocate to other Andhra government jobs, should excite so much comment, often involving negativity towards Hindus. Religious freedom should include the right of institutions to not employ those who may be inimical to it, but in “secular” India it is apparently a pointer to Hindu bigotry.

That there may be practical difficulties in removing these non-Hindus from the TTD board service is clear: those who have converted away from Hinduism often do not change their names for various reasons. This means you can only know whether someone with a Hindu name is a Hindu if you intrusively enter their homes or probe their actual religious practices. But even here, there is no guarantee that justice will be done.

In a judgment of the Madras High Court in 2021, a division bench overturned the local administration’s decision to revoke a woman’s Scheduled Caste certificate even though she regularly went to church and displayed a cross in her clinic. The openness of the average Hindu to accepting religious symbols and influences from outside her culture is beginning to work against the community’s larger interests, for this openness and tolerance is—at the ideological level—largely a one-way street.

One cannot, therefore, presume that an equally woke Andhra Pradesh High Court or the Supreme Court will not do the same when the TTD seeks to implement its policy of removing non-Hindus from its employee rosters. More so if these employees are involved only in “secular” activities within TTD, for Article 25 2(a) allows the state to intervene in the secular functions of religious institutions.

Need for equal rights

The two central reasons why Hindus face discrimination in religious matters are the following:

One, the Constitution itself gives the state the right to intervene in Hindu religious affairs in the name of social justice. Article 25 2(b) and the first explanation to it allow the state to meddle in Hindu religious practices in the name of “social welfare and reform”, even while conferring a special right to Sikhs to carry kirpans. So there is a general right to intervene in Hindu affairs, and a specific benefit to one segment of the population.

Two, the Constitution presumes Hindus to be a majority community, and thus goes further to provide special rights and protections to communities deemed to be in a minority (Articles 29 and 30). These articles, which allow minorities to run their own cultural and religious institutions, should ideally have had an additional line saying that no right available to minorities should be denied to the majority. In the absence of this one line, the courts have a ball intervening only in Hindu affairs. As an aside one must observe that strong constitutional protections for minorities can exist only, and only if, India is already a Hindu state. If you are a liberal, you must back two opposing propositions: that India cannot be a Hindu state, and since we are a secular state, Hindus cannot have equal religious rights.

But there are two subtle reasons why Hindus get discriminated against since the sphere of “religion” is itself defined by the Christian experience in Europe. We inherited ideas from a colonial administration and we are yet to shed this lens. We thus tend to have a jaundiced view of our own culture, for Hinduism is only partly a religion. Most pre-Christian and pagan cultures did not have religion in the way the Abrahamic religions—Christianity, Islam and Judaism—defined it.

The larger Islamic and Christian worldview ideologically puts non-Abrahamic religions on a lower plane, apparently because they are not “people of the book” or because binary logic dictates that if my god is true, all others must be false. While the regular dissing of India under Narendra Modi as an intolerant Hindu nation is par for the course in the West and in Left-liberal circles, this put-down now extends to anyone who is Hindu even in the US.

Just a few days ago, Financial Times columnist Edward Luce wrote a bigoted comment on the choice of Tulsi Gabbard, who self-identifies as a Vaishnavite Hindu, for overseeing 18 US intelligence agencies. Among other things, he said she was the devotee of an “obscure religious cult.” An appalling observation, given that Luce has spent considerable time in India as the South Asia bureau chief of the same newspaper. The point is not whether Luce thinks of Gabbard’s faith as linked to an “obscure” cult; the point is why mention this at all when Article 6 of the US Constitution says that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” Earlier, when she was a candidate in the 2020 US presidential primaries, she was tarred for being a Hindu or having Hindutva sympathies. Left-wing publications in India also tend to do the same.

Are Hindus really a majority?

The linking of Hindus with majoritarianism is now so ubiquitous that we have stopped examining the underlying rationale for this mischaracterisation. The word majoritarian cannot be applied to a religion that was not identified as a religion at all till colonial times. Unlike Abrahamic religions, which tend to have a specific historical founder, a holy book and clearly defined “fundamentals” that all believers must accept, Hinduism is defined more by tradition, practice and ritual (and even choice of diet, in some cases). There is a lot of scripture to guide Hindus, but you can be one without reference to any one of them. The difficulty in defining who is a Hindu forces our own law-makers to define Hindus as NOTA people (ie, belonging to “none of the above” clearly defined religions). If you are not a follower of Islam, Christianity, Judaism or even Buddhism, Jainism or Sikhism, you may be deemed a Hindu.

If Hinduism cannot be easily defined, how can the 79 per cent of Indians who do not fall into any of the above categories be called a majority? Are the vehemently anti-Hindu Periyarists of Tamil Nadu Hindus? Are avowedly atheist Communists of Kerala and West Bengal Hindus? Left-liberals also seek to separate tribals from Hinduism by calling them Adivasis—that is, they are claimed to be the original residents of the land. So how does a Hinduism so negatively defined become a brute majority—and deserving of lesser rights than the minorities?

How are Hindus a majoritarian force when no Hindu sect or sampradaya (which is not the equivalent of a denomination) is anywhere as large as the 14-plus per cent of the population who are Muslims? Does a Hindu “majority” conjured up by this “none of the above” definition really constitute a threat to its alleged minorities, the largest of whom number above 200 million? Contrast this with the fact that actual Hindu minorities in several Christian and Muslim-majority states in India receive no special status.

The idea of Hindu majoritarianism is a media and academic myth propagated to consolidate the minority vote in favour of some parties. It has no basis in reality. The Constitution needs to be amended to grant equal rights to all Hindus (and their various sects and sampradayas) in terms of running their religious and cultural institutions.

Kausik Gangopadhyay, a professor at the Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode, has written a brilliant book, The Majoritarian Myth, which discusses “how unscientific social theories create disharmony” in society. His thesis is simple: the bland assumption that a numerical majority always oppresses minorities may be wrong, for what matters is the cultural drive underlying the majority community’s long-term goals. Gangopadhyay uses a concept called the linear theory of social evolution (LTSE) to determine whether a numerical majority is actually a threat to pluralism and tolerance.

LTSE ideology—it could be a religion, or a secular ideology like communism or liberalism—has two characteristics. First, its end goal is a non-falsifiable proposition that cannot be given up regardless of actual human experience. A Communist, for example, does not have to question the validity of the Marxist end goal just because all experiments in Communism (from Stalin to Mao and Pol Pot) have failed. Nor does a Muslim, Christian or Jew ever have to accept the validity of other faiths, since their holy books say theirs is the only truth.

Second, votaries of LTSE ideologies believe it is “moral” to practice discrimination against non-believers, whether called satan-worshippers, kafirs, gentiles, capitalist lackeys or “Conservatives”. At the very least, they must be cancelled and not given platforms to speak. Any LTSE ideology is linear in thought and thus sets itself up for intolerance. Anyone opposing it is, by definition, on the wrong side of history. Hinduism, unlike traditional Abrahamic religions, is non-linear in thought (the karmic cycle is one example) and driven more by practice than just theory or scripture. It can evolve through an experiential process and correct historical wrongs. Ask yourself, which country has given itself an open-ended, ever-rising, cast-in-stone affirmative action programme to uplift its downtrodden?

This is not to suggest that Hindus cannot commit crimes against the designated minorities or “outgroups”. But this is not because they constitute a majority in India.

The macro evidence clearly points to this. Genocides have been more common in the Christian, Islamic and Communist worlds in the past, but not in non-LTSE cultures. After 1947, the only real victims of ethnic cleansing in our subcontinent have been Hindus (Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Kashmir), and sometimes also Christians, Sikhs and Buddhists§. But we are supposed to observe a code of omerta about these genocides because they may offend the officially designated minorities.

It is time to abandon not just the majoritarian myth but also look more closely at millenarian ideologies through the LTSE framework. TTD’s moves are defensive in nature, a protective shield for Hinduism. It has nothing to do with bigotry.

Yogi Adiytanth’s evocative maxim, Batenge to katenge (divided we lose), is nowhere as relevant as in the religious sphere, where the inability of Hindus to unite to defend religious rights has cost all Hindus dearly.

R Jagannathan is editorial director at Swarajya magazine. Views are personal.

(Edited by Theres Sudeep)