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.