The appeasement Of None
By Gopal Krishna Agarwal,
Communal politics, which ironically
passes for secularism in this country, has been the bane of Indian politics. It
can be traced back to the British policy of ‘divide and rule’, the result of
which was Partition. The Constitution was a repudiation of these ideas and the
politics that perpetuated them. It rejected the suggestions for a separate
electorate for the minorities and the proportional representation system, which
it felt would lead to a perpetually enervated nation. But in most policies that
have been followed until now, we have seen furtherance of vote-bank politics.
The narrative has to change.
The recent PIL filed by a Jammu-based
advocate, Ankur Sharma, in the Supreme Court, alleging that the rights of
religious and linguistic minorities in the State are being “siphoned off
illegally and arbitrarily” and the subsequent affidavits by the Central and
Jammu and Kashmir governments give us a chance to look again into the
secularism versus communalism debate.