The Indian Supreme Court and the quest for a ‘rational’ Hinduism

Minimal Secularism: Lessons for, and from, India

“…In a landmark (Mormon) polygamy case in 1899, it drew a distinction between inviolable 'beliefs' and legally challengeable 'practices' -and suggested that only the former were central to religion. While the Indian Supreme Court eschewed this Protestant distinction between belief and practice, it has sought to legitimize state intervention by drawing its own distinctions: between 'essential' and 'non-essential' practices, 'high' and 'popular' spirituality, or 'pure' religion and 'superstitious accretions' (Jacobsohn 2003, Sen 2009. Such judicial activism would violate both the Free Exercise and the Establishment clauses of the First Amendment.…”

“…The Supreme Court's extensive and messy jurisprudence has been controversial in this regard. It is not the role of secular authorities, it has been claimed, to participate actively in the internal reinterpretation of Hinduism (Dhavan 1987, Sen 2009, Jacobsohn 2003, Galanter 1997b. The separation between state and religion is paradigmatic of the liberal commitment to the distinction between public and private, and state intervention in the domain of religion is prima facie suspect.…”

“…The Supreme Court's extensive and messy jurisprudence has been controversial in this regard. It is not the role of secular authorities, it has been claimed, to participate actively in the internal reinterpretation of Hinduism (Dhavan 1987;Galanter 1997b;Jacobsohn 2003;Sen 2009;.…”

The Holy Cow: Unravelling the Mystery of its Holiness

“…Significant argumentation on the right to freedom of religion resulted in the development of the doctrine of ‘essential practices’ by the Supreme Court, which examined the necessity of practices on the anvil of theological texts to conclusively determine whether they were grounded in religious prescriptions; the Court while relying on Hamilton’s translation of the Hedaya Book XLIII dismissed the possibility of any obligatory duty enjoined upon Muslims to necessarily sacrifice a cow during Bakr ‘Id. Sen critiques the ‘essential practices’ doctrine as a mechanism for legitimating a rationalized form of religion and de-legitimating popular usages of religion, thereby enabling further superficial homogenization and rejection of internal diversity (Sen, 2010). C. J. Das (for the Court) upheld the constitutionality of the ban by explaining the agricultural usefulness of the cow, bull and buffaloes, and in extension permitted the killing of buffaloes and bulls that were incapable of yielding milk or breeding.…”

Courts of Law and Legal Practice

“…In addition, the secular state in India is often involved in deciding what constitutes a "religious group" in the first place. This can be seen clearly in Ronojoy Sen's analysis of the Supreme Court's ruling that the Ramakrishna mission's petition be declared non-Hindu (Sen 2010) as well as in the many analyses of the so called "Hindutva Judgment," in which the Supreme Court decreed that Hinduism was a way of life and not a religion (Nauriya 1996;Noorani 2002).…”