The Diversity Trap

IN THE TIME Chief Justice of India (CJI) DY Chandrachud wielded the gavel, he reminded us about the difference being different makes.

Such was his commitment that one time he even presumed to re-write the coda of biology. Confusing sex with gender, he observed, “There is no absolute concept of a man or an absolute concept of a woman at all. It’s not the question of what your genitals are.”

So, it didn’t surprise when he in his last judgment did away with an almost six-decade-old “jurisprudential” certitude. In 1967, the Supreme Court had observed correctly that to earn a minority tag, an educational institution must be both established and managed by the minority community. This the Supreme Court had found to be lacking in Aligarh Muslim University (AMU).

But almost 60 years later, Chandrachud had other ideas. A seven-judge bench led by him ruled by a majority 4-3 to overturn the 1967 Supreme Court judgment. Though the CJI-led bench has frustratingly left the question of determining AMU’s minority character to an adjunct bench by scrapping the 1967 Supreme Court judgment, it has virtually restored the university’s minority status.

The Chandrachud-authored majority verdict has been welcomed in left-liberal quarters as a timely “pushback” against “saffron supremacists” in the “executive” who they claim is unpardonably force-fitting India’s diversity into the straight jacket of uniformity.

Vindicated, AMU’s administrators say that they now feel empowered to go ahead with extending quotas to Muslims and to use the classroom to serve community interests.

While Chandrachud has given AMU’s supporters reason to cheer, three judges also penned separate and very powerful dissenting judgments. These could just as easily have a bearing on the outcome of the adjunct case.

Focusing on the equity principle, these judges opine that since AMU is a Union government-administered and funded university, it must be subject to secular guidelines that apply to other state-funded Central universities.

They claim that the CJI’s impulse to safeguard diversity cannot be based on the automatic assumption, “that the minorities of the country require some safe haven for attaining education and knowledge.”

Since AMU is a union government-administered and funded university, it must be subject to secular guidelines that apply to other state-funded central universities

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To notch up the Supreme Court’s verdict as a timely victory for diversity is classic liberal cosplay. As the precept goes, “multiculturalism is a central tenet of liberalism, liberalism is not a central tenet of multiculturalism.”

AMU was founded by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan pre- Independence. The Muslim venerable was not the much-vaunted advocate for pluralism as he is made out to be. Khan was the first to claim that Muslims and Hindus were two separate nations. And that only by acknowledging Muslims as a “separate party” could a post-Independence Indian state ensure the survival of Islamic culture and identity.

That today an institution run by the federal government is being allowed by the highest court to ghettoise itself not only feeds into its founder’s sense of ‘separatism’ but also blurs the lines between the church and the state.

Professor S Nurul Hasan, minister of education in the Indira Gandhi government, said as much in Lok Sabha in 1972, “this [minority status] is not a demand which is in the national interest…Any single institution cannot be maintained by the Central government for the benefit exclusively of one community or to be run by a single community.”

Unfortunately, the latest AMU judgment isn’t the result of a one-off misapplication of mind. Several examples abound that suggest that thinking in some of our critical institutions is caught in the diversity trap: The blind belief that preserving notions of “being different makes a difference.”

The trouble is that do-gooding Diversity, Equality, Identity (DEI) crusaders on the left display a hopelessly selective respect for pluralism. If they were truly committed to upholding diversity, their hackles ought to have been raised when, for instance, the Supreme Court decided to trample upon a Hindu custom by allowing women entry into Sabarimala when, as many legal experts pointed out, “the Constitution sanctions nothing of the sort.”

Likewise, for years, Hindus have pleaded in vain before higher courts, to legislatures and in the court of public opinion, to end the nationalisation of their places of worship, to insulate their customs, practices and rituals from erosion through state meddling.

It is often forgotten that the customs of the majority community are just as vulnerable to liberal progressivism.

Taken too far, such one-sidedness may lead to a backlash as the rise of a new populist protest politics in the West and in the US is amply demonstrating.

About The Author

Rahul Shivshankar

Rahul Shivshankar is Consulting Editor, Network 18

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